Thrombocytopenia and Platelet Disorders in Children — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Thrombocytopenia and Platelet Disorders 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. A frightening number in a well child
2. One line down, everything else fine
3. Her parents heard the number
4. Blisters inside his cheeks
5. A bleed that cannot wait
6. Fifteen months of clinic visits
7. A bruised newborn, and a well mother
8. She has a low count herself
9. Eczema, infections and a bruised baby
10. Cells nearly the size of red ones
11. Normal count, and nothing works
12. No radius, but a perfect thumb
13. Short, pigmented, and missing thumbs
14. It began after the new medicine
15. Nothing left inside the bone
16. A rash, and a child who looks awful
17. What is he allowed to do now
18. A tap he cannot safely have yet

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: The count must have fallen further, A thrombopoietin receptor agonist, The feeding difficulty, Holt-Oram syndrome, Drug-induced thrombocytopenia, Acute leukaemia, in, As primary immune destruction, Proceed using a finer needle.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Look at the film before you believe the number. Clumping explains more than disease does.
• What makes you do a marrow is the second abnormality, never the first one.
• The number frightens the parents. The bleeding decides the treatment.
• Dry purpura watches. Wet purpura treats. Look inside the mouth every time.
• Never transfuse for the count. Always transfuse for the bleed that could kill him.
• After a year the question changes from what the count is to what her life is like.

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.