Antiphospholipid Syndrome in Children – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Antiphospholipid syndrome in children 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 clot with no reason
2. Three things to send
3. Once is not enough
4. A number that misleads
5. The test nobody ordered
6. More than a clot
7. Looking for the parent disease
8. The first event in the young
9. Everything at once
10. Not one after another
11. Keeping it from happening again
12. The tablet that looks easier
13. Positive, but nothing has happened
14. Another drug to add
15. The baby of an affected mother
16. An operation to plan
17. It came and it went
18. Going away to university

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Simple immobility on the flight, which needs no further investigation at all, Lupus anticoagulant, anticardiolipin and anti-beta-2-glycoprotein I, A bone marrow examination to exclude an underlying blood disorder, She has liver disease, which is the usual cause of this pattern, Cross-reaction with the lipid antigen used in that particular assay, As unrelated findings requiring three separate specialist referrals, Coeliac disease, which would explain the hair loss and the joint aches, Brain involvement occurs only through vessel inflammation, The catastrophic form, with several organs failing within a week, Heparin alone, with the other measures held until cultures return, No treatment, with monitoring and a return only if symptoms recur later, They are better, but only once she has reached her eighteenth birthday, No anticoagulation, with attention to avoidable risks and cover when needed, A second antiplatelet drug taken alongside the warfarin daily.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• A teenage clot plus livedo: look for the antibody.
• Three assays: the anticoagulant and two solid-phase.
• Retest at twelve weeks before the label is applied.
• Long in the tube, clotting in the child.
• A false positive from a lipid-based screening test.
• Chorea, livedo and low platelets travel with it.

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 rheumatology and immunology case decks · pediatric reference values.