Acquired Aplastic Anaemia – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Acquired Aplastic Anaemia 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. Beyond the marrow
2. Made or destroyed
3. A dilute sample
4. Waiting for one result
5. Dark morning urine
6. After jaundice
7. Grading the failure
8. The first choice
9. No donor in sight
10. Still transfused
11. When to stop
12. No response at six months
13. A generous offer
14. Before the first dose
15. Weeks without neutrophils
16. Iron piling up
17. Off the drug
18. A new chromosome finding

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Petechiae over both shins and across the soft palate, A raised mean cell volume on the full blood count, A trephine core, Transfusions are unsafe until the result is known, Red cell glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase assay, Hepatitis A virus persists in the marrow, Non-severe, as the haemoglobin is held, Horse antithymocyte globulin with ciclosporin first, Rabbit antithymocyte globulin with ciclosporin, Too early to judge, as this regimen acts slowly, Stop it now, since his counts have recovered fully, Marrow from the unrelated volunteer donor, Accept it, as family blood is safest for him, Fluconazole once daily.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• An empty marrow gives an empty abdomen: a big spleen means look elsewhere.
• Reticulocytes are the marrow’s output: low with anaemia means the factory has stopped.
• Aspirate for the cells, trephine for the cellularity.
• Test before you treat: an inherited marrow failure will not answer to ATG.
• Aplastic anaemia and PNH are neighbours: look for the clone at diagnosis.
• Seronegative hepatitis, then an empty marrow weeks later: the same immune story.

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 Haematology case decks · pediatric reference values.