Cholesteatoma – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

cholesteatoma 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. High on the drum
2. It always comes back
3. Skin in a trap
4. A white pearl
5. Why he hears less
6. A stronger bottle
7. The room spins
8. What the operation is for
9. Keeping the bowl clean
10. Going back in
11. Still on the books
12. A clean dip
13. Years of negative pressure
14. Not a cancer
15. Four years after the tear
16. A child’s version
17. Nobody has seen it
18. The hearing afterwards

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Inflamed canal skin blocking the whole ear with scale, A process that drops quieten but cannot ever cure, The skin becomes cancerous and invades the bone, A patch of calcium deposited in the drum, The small bones of the middle ear have eroded, Drops are too weak to reach the upper part of the ear, Low blood pressure when he changes position, To drain the pus and leave the rest of it alone, Regular clearance in clinic, since it cannot self-clean, To remove the ventilation tube that was inserted, Review is needed only if the discharge comes back, Give six weeks of antibiotic drops to clear it, A eustachian tube that never works draws the drum inwards, It is a cancer, and it spreads through the bloodstream.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• White flakes in a retracted upper drum: trapped skin.
• Foul discharge that always returns is not simple.
• Skin that cannot shed outwards destroys what it meets.
• A white pearl behind an intact drum from birth.
• Erosion of the ossicles is why the hearing drops.
• Drops quieten the infection; surgery removes the skin.

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 ENT and ophthalmology case decks · pediatric reference values.