Alopecia Areata – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Alopecia areata 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 smooth bare circle
2. Hairs of every length
3. Under the lens
4. Looking at the nails
5. Testing the edge
6. What else to check
7. One coin-sized area
8. A band at the hairline
9. Everything gone
10. First thing to try
11. The tempting shortcut
12. Straight into the skin
13. Deliberate irritation
14. The first new growth
15. Help that can be prescribed
16. Will it come back
17. Without lashes
18. Why this child

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Tinea capitis of the occipital scalp, Hair pulling by the child himself, Comma-shaped hairs of a fungal scalp infection, Iron deficiency showing in the nails, Disease that is still active at the margin, A full blood count and ferritin level, The patch will scar and never regrow, A common pattern with an excellent outlook, Loss of all scalp and body hair, called universalis, A course of oral steroid for several months, A long course by mouth is safe at this age, Surgical transplantation of hair follicles, Contact sensitisation of the scalp, The pale hairs mean that the treatment has failed.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Smooth, round, no scale: the follicles are still there.
• Angular edge, mixed lengths, stubble: it is being pulled.
• Tapering hairs at the edge: the patch is still active.
• Fine regular pits on the nails belong to the same disease.
• Hairs lifting at the edge: that patch is still spreading.
• Look for thyroid autoimmunity when the family fits.

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 dermatology case decks · pediatric reference values.