Mycoplasma Pneumoniae Infection – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Mycoplasma Pneumoniae Infection 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. Film versus stethoscope
2. Tight chest, long cough
3. The long wait at home
4. Choosing the sample
5. A test taken too early
6. Two organisms, one child
7. A stronger drug from the same family
8. A result that arrives late
9. Fever that will not settle
10. Mouth, eyes, few spots
11. What threatens the future
12. Two causes still open
13. Weak legs after the cough
14. Numbers that cannot be right
15. A heart rate too fast
16. Targets on the hands
17. Sickle cells and a new cough
18. Back to class

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: A sign of a second bacterial infection needing cover, No, the wheeze means the swab is a false result, Within a day or two, as it spreads very fast, A bedside test for cold agglutinins in his blood, Antibodies may not be made yet, so it proves little, Carriage, Ceftriaxone cannot be given to children her age, Start clarithromycin for the full course now, Change to doxycycline, Drug-induced toxic epidermal necrolysis, Skin biopsies to stage the rash, Stop aciclovir, as the swab explains the illness, Antibodies against it cross-react with nerve tissue, Transfuse urgently for severe anaemia.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Walking pneumonia: a well-looking child with a film that looks worse than she does.
• In a school-age child whose asthma suddenly worsens with a long dry cough, think of Mycoplasma.
• Mycoplasma is slow: a long incubation, so a family falls ill over weeks.
• For Mycoplasma, swab the throat for PCR; the cold agglutinin test belongs to history.
• Serology looks backwards: too early and it is negative, too late and it still is not.
• A positive swab is not a diagnosis; a positive blood culture usually is.

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 Respiratory case decks · pediatric reference values.