Heat Stroke – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Heat stroke 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. Down at the finish line
2. Which thermometer
3. The tub on the touchline
4. Knowing when to stop
5. The medicine that does nothing
6. A drug from another syndrome
7. Still sweating
8. The blood tests two days on
9. Found in the back seat
10. At the roadside tub
11. No bath available
12. Unsteady weeks later
13. Back to the team
14. Getting used to it
15. Confused, but not hot
16. The drug in the heatwave
17. What decides the outcome
18. What the sports day needs

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Heat exhaustion, which spares the thinking, A probe sited in the rectum or the gullet, Send him in the ambulance before any cooling, Carry on until the reading is below 36 degrees, His set point in the brain was never raised, That it should be given once the cooling has begun, As a sign that the cooling has already worked, Hepatitis A picked up on the school trip abroad, Heat stroke arising without any exertion at all, Load him now and cool him during the journey, Place ice packs in both armpits and nowhere else, A stroke in the territory of a large artery, He restarts in steps, after a review weeks on, Salt tablets taken before every training session.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Hot, confused and just exercised: heat stroke.
• Suspected heat stroke: measure the core, not the skin.
• Exertional heat stroke: cold water, and cool on the spot.
• Stop cooling near 38.5: the core falls on afterwards.
• Antipyretics do nothing in heat stroke: cool instead.
• Dantrolene belongs to malignant hyperthermia, not heat.

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 emergency and critical care case decks · pediatric reference values.