Asthma in Children: Diagnosis and Chronic Management

What this deck covers

Asthma 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 board, MRCPCH and Prometric examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Coughing every night since the spring
2. Proving it with a blowing test
3. When the blowing test looks fine
4. Too young to blow into anything
5. Reaching for the blue one too often
6. Before you step anything up
7. The next rung of the ladder
8. How the drug actually gets in
9. Will the preventer stunt him?
10. A sore white mouth
11. One sheet of paper that helps
12. Wheezing only on the football pitch
13. The mattress cover question
14. The thing worth fixing first
15. The jab to offer each autumn
16. Still bad on the strongest step
17. A wet cough that never dries
18. What to ask at the clinic

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: An inhaled foreign body lodged in a lower airway, Skin prick testing to the common inhaled allergens, Measure the exhaled nitric oxide level, Start a regular low-dose inhaled corticosteroid, Start a maintenance course of low-dose oral steroid, A nebuliser used at home each morning and evening, There is no measurable effect on growth at any dose, Deposition of the inhaled steroid in the mouth, Continue the reliever before exercise, Her exposure to tobacco smoke at home, Offer the annual influenza vaccine, Protracted bacterial bronchitis.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• A clear chest in clinic is what you expect. It is not evidence against the diagnosis.
• Normal spirometry on a good day is the expected result, not a reassuring one.
• Testing a well child on a good day answers a question you did not ask.
• Fix the stop date before you write the prescription, or nobody ever stops it.
• Count the reliever. More than twice a week is a prescription decision, not an observation.
• Ask the child to show you. Never accept a description of the technique.

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 Respiratory Board Questions case decks · pediatric reference values.