Congenital Melanocytic Naevus – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Congenital melanocytic naevus 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. Brown from birth
2. Measuring it properly
3. The scattered spots
4. How big is the risk
5. A lump appears
6. The swelling head
7. Darker in the teenage years
8. What the parents ask
9. Blue-grey at birth
10. An early operation
11. Dry and itchy
12. Between appointments
13. Headaches at seven
14. What surgery can do
15. Why the blood tests are clear
16. Who needs the clinic
17. When to watch hardest
18. The polo neck in summer

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Dermal melanocytosis of the shoulder region, By the size it will reach in adulthood, A skin biopsy taken from the largest of the patches, No higher than for any other child of the same age, A proliferative nodule, common in infancy, A brain tumour that is unrelated to his birthmark, An early sign of change requiring urgent excision, Excise it under local anaesthetic during this year, Dermal melanocytosis, which fades over years, Full thickness excision with a skin graft, A potent topical corticosteroid applied twice daily, Any increase in the hair growing inside the patch, In pigment cells within the nervous system, It will remove every trace within two operations.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Raised, hairy and brown at birth: a melanocytic naevus.
• Size is judged by what it will become, not what it is.
• Many satellites: look inside the nervous system early.
• A few per cent, and mostly in the first years of life.
• Lumps that come and go in infancy are usually benign.
• Big head and vomiting with satellites: pigment inside.

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 dermatology case decks · pediatric reference values.