Congenital Cataract – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

congenital cataract 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. The newborn check
2. First weeks in theatre
3. Why the hurry
4. Does it matter
5. Look at the parents
6. A layer in the lens
7. A small eye
8. Focusing without a lens
9. Not yet permanent
10. Dimming again
11. Eyes that will not settle
12. Missed at birth
13. One step further
14. Close work afterwards
15. The other eye
16. Years later
17. The prescription changes
18. Too late to see

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Blood lying in the front chamber after the delivery, Remove both lenses before the age of two months, The lens will harden with time and become impossible to remove, An opacity that can be photographed with an ordinary hand camera, An inherited cataract, with the same opacity in her father’s eye, A dense central opacity blocking the entire visual axis, A tumour of the retina at the back of that eye, Dilating drops each morning to widen both of the pupils fully, Defer the implant, because the eye’s focusing power keeps changing, The implant has become dislocated within the eye, Normal wandering movements for a baby of this age, A normal newborn check excludes it completely, The back of the capsule is opened at the same operation, A stronger distance prescription in both of her spectacles.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• A chalky disc behind the pupil is a cataract.
• Dense cataracts in a baby are removed within weeks.
• An infant eye must be used or the pathway is lost.
• Only a central opacity over three millimetres threatens sight.
• Bilateral cataract in a well baby: examine the parents.
• A cloudy layer with clear lens each side: lamellar.

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 ENT and ophthalmology case decks · pediatric reference values.