The Anaemic Child and Iron Deficiency — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

The Anaemic Child and Iron Deficiency 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. Chewing the corner of the rug
2. A result nobody meant to take
3. Two children, one morning
4. Tired, and the arthritis is flaring
5. How long will she need it
6. Is the medicine working
7. Eight weeks and no change
8. Normal count, empty stores
9. The house is being stripped
10. An hour after the tablets
11. What is in the bottle
12. Pale but still running about
13. Pale since she was born
14. Breathless before the blood arrives
15. Two months back from abroad
16. Six weeks on the unit
17. Who should she be testing
18. Referred as a diet problem

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Anaemia of inflammation, A haemolytic process, The red cell count and the distribution width, Marrow infiltration, Until the haemoglobin normalises, at, The ferritin, Sideroblastic anaemia of the congenital type, Folate deficiency, Transient erythroblastopenia of childhood, Fanconi anaemia, Exchange transfusion, It requires erythropoietin.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Ask what the toddler puts in his mouth. The history is often more useful than the film.
• Know the nadir. It saves a well baby from iron, a needle and a frightened mother.
• Two small-celled children, one answer: look at how many red cells there are and how alike they are.
• Low iron with a LOW binding capacity is inflammation. Low iron with a HIGH one is deficiency.
• Treat the number, then treat the stores. Three months past normal is the habit worth keeping.
• One week is a reticulocyte question. Four weeks is a haemoglobin question.

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.