Gastroenterology Board Questions
Gastroenterology and hepatology generate more recalled Prometric questions than any other system — more than cardiology and respiratory combined. It is also the system candidates most often under-revise.
The questions concentrate on the vomiting infant and what separates the four causes that matter: physiological reflux in a thriving baby, cow’s milk protein allergy, pyloric stenosis with its hypochloraemic hypokalaemic metabolic alkalosis, and malrotation with volvulus, where bile-stained vomiting means an urgent upper GI contrast study and not a period of observation. Bile in the vomit of a newborn is surgical until imaging says otherwise, and the exam tests that sentence more than any other in this system.
The second cluster is ingestion. A button battery in the oesophagus is an emergency measured in hours, a coin in the oesophagus is not, and a caustic ingestion is the one where you do not induce vomiting and do not pass a blind nasogastric tube.
The third is chronic diarrhoea and failure to thrive — coeliac serology and its dependence on adequate gluten intake and on IgA level, toddler’s diarrhoea in a well child, and the inflammatory bowel disease presentation that hides behind isolated growth failure or delayed puberty.
The board questions below are exam-format, each with the correct answer and an explanation of every distractor. Work them alongside the free most-recalled Prometric gastroenterology set, which draws on the same corpus of recalled questions.
