Bartter Syndrome – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Bartter Syndrome 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. Too much fluid
2. The baby who cannot be filled
3. Three explanations
4. Two ages, two illnesses
5. Large doses, no effect
6. What comes first
7. Watching the drug that helps
8. Bright spots in the kidneys
9. A sick day
10. The muscles that give way
11. The ears
12. Hormone or tubule
13. The tablets nobody prescribed
14. A word with the teacher
15. The medicine cupboard at home
16. The next pregnancy
17. Twenty years from now
18. Leaving the children’s clinic

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: A fetal tubular disorder producing a large urine output, Restrict his fluids until the sodium normalises, A urinary chloride, which is low when vomiting is the cause, The same condition varying only with how carefully it is sought, The tablets are poorly absorbed from the child’s stomach, A proton pump inhibitor to protect his stomach lining, His kidney function and his gastric symptoms, Stop his salt supplements, which are causing all of the calcium, Double all his medicines to cover the extra losses tonight, An acute neurological illness unrelated to his condition, One genetic subtype affects the ear and the kidney together, A urinary potassium that is inappropriately high, Nothing further, as the biochemistry is already diagnostic, A statement that he should be excused from all sport.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Too much liquor with normal kidneys: the fetus is leaking salt.
• You cannot fill a leaking bucket by pouring less in.
• Chloride in the urine tells you where the chloride is being lost.
• Where in the tubule decides when in life.
• Chase the salt, or the potassium you give goes straight out.
• Salt is the floor the rest of the treatment stands on.

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 nephrology case decks · pediatric reference values.