Complement Deficiency and Asplenia – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Complement deficiency and asplenia 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. Screening the whole cascade
2. One line down, one still up
3. Lupus in a very young child
4. Pus, and then protein in the urine
5. Fulminant, and only in the boys
6. Common, and mostly harmless
7. The injections he needs on top
8. The rest of the household
9. A medicine that opens a door
10. Dots inside the red cells
11. How fast it can go wrong
12. Which bug does the damage
13. The tablet twice a day, for years
14. Two weeks in a mountain village
15. Four weeks to get ready
16. One more than the schedule gives
17. Planning the trip to see family
18. Saving what can be saved

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Immunoglobulin subclasses with specific antibody titres, A classical pathway defect, the alternative pathway intact, Drug-induced lupus from an antibiotic, A neutrophil killing defect, An X-linked deficiency of properdin, An early classical pathway component deficiency of some kind, A single extra dose of the conjugate vaccine at sixteen, Wait until a sibling becomes unwell and then test, The monoclonal antibody blocking her terminal pathway, Basophilic stippling, Recurrent viral illnesses that last far longer, Pseudomonas aeruginosa from the environment, Lifelong penicillin V, with an alert card carried, A second supply of his usual daily preventive tablet.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Screen both pathways, not a single component.
• One assay lost means an early defect in it.
• Very early lupus-like disease: check the cascade.
• Pyogenic sepsis plus nephritis: think C3 loss.
• Fulminant disease in males only: properdin.
• Lectin deficiency is common and usually harmless.

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 rheumatology and immunology case decks · pediatric reference values.