Sickle Cell Disease in Children — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Sickle Cell Disease in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. An organ that was not there yesterday
2. All four limbs swollen at nine months
3. An abnormal blood spot in a well baby
4. Positive, but positive for what exactly
5. Ten days of fever over one shin
6. Six months of groin pain at fifteen
7. Five hours, and too embarrassed to come in
8. A shrunken organ on an unrelated scan
9. Wet nights and very pale urine
10. An optometrist found it first
11. An ankle ulcer that will not close
12. Two school years quietly lost
13. Booked for theatre next month
14. Two hours in the waiting room
15. Blood in the urine, and no pain at all
16. Why keep taking it if he is well
17. A cheerful child with a high fever
18. Her family were told it was the mild kind

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: An aplastic episode, in, Haemoglobin chromatography, Salmonella species, An immediate transfusion, An overactive bladder.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Reticulocytes high means the spleen is stealing the blood. Reticulocytes low means the marrow stopped.
• Normal films are expected. The periosteum takes a fortnight to catch up with the pain.
• You screen in the window where the baby is well. That window is the whole opportunity.
• Positive means present. Only the proportions tell you carrier from disease.
• Cover both organisms from the start. You cannot tell infarct from infection at the bedside.
• Months of hip pain with no fever in this disease is the femoral head until proven otherwise.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Haematology case decks · pediatric reference values.