Self-Limited Epilepsy with Centrotemporal Spikes – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

self-limited epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes 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. What his mother saw
2. When they happen
3. Reading the trace
4. A request for a scan
5. The brother’s trace
6. Coloured circles
7. Screaming after bedtime
8. Where it starts
9. How many more
10. A change of plan
11. Choosing a medicine
12. In the classroom
13. Losing ground
14. A speech disorder in the family
15. A frightening question
16. Behind the wheel
17. Grown out of it
18. At the bedside

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Staring with eyelid flutter lasting ten seconds, Soon after falling asleep or just before waking, Generalised polyspike and wave, worse on photic stimulation, A scan only if a third seizure occurs within the next year, An EEG trait that most carriers never have seizures from, Migraine with visual aura and no epileptic process, Nightmares arising from dreaming sleep, They reflect a lesion in the facial nerve nucleus, Most children have few seizures, often fewer than ten, Continue without any medicine, since remission is certain anyway, Vigabatrin, as used for epileptic spasms in infants, They will need an increase in her antiseizure medicine, Epileptic encephalopathy with spike-wave activation in sleep, SCN1A, which encodes a neuronal voltage-gated sodium channel.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Rolandic seizure: half the face, drooling, speechless, aware.
• Rolandic seizures cluster at sleep onset and on waking.
• Rolandic spikes: big, diphasic, and louder when drowsy.
• Typical rolandic epilepsy: no brain scan is required.
• Spikes without seizures: a trait, not a disease.
• Coloured circles, then headache: occipital epilepsy.

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 Neurology case decks · pediatric reference values.