The Cyanosed Newborn – 18 Board-Style Cases with Answers

What this deck covers

The Cyanosed Newborn 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 board, MRCPCH and Prometric examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Blue hands, pink tongue
2. Ten minutes in the headbox
3. Pink, and still not right
4. Two hours from the centre
5. Two circuits side by side
6. Empty lung fields, a murmur
7. Collapsed on day four
8. The infusion that backfires
9. Worse every time you touch him
10. Higher above, lower below
11. The wrong way round
12. Chocolate in the syringe
13. Two babies, one question
14. A boot on the film
15. Ninety minutes by road
16. The alarm that should be reset
17. An hour before they arrive
18. Told at the anomaly scan

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Acrocyanosis, Start a prostaglandin infusion, Tetralogy of Fallot, in, Duct-dependent pulmonary circulation, Late-onset bacterial sepsis, Persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, Normal transitional circulation, Methaemoglobinaemia, The degree of effort the baby is making to breathe, Transposition of the great arteries, in.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Look at the tongue, then look at the probe. Do not look at the lips.
• Oxygen fixes lungs. It does not fix a shunt. That is the whole test.
• The screen is designed to catch the baby who looks fine. Believe it, not the colour.
• Grey, poor pulses, acidotic, day one. Prostaglandin first, scan afterwards.
• Profound early cyanosis, comfortable breathing, increased markings. Think parallel circuits.
• Cyanosis with empty lung fields is a duct holding the pulmonary circulation open.

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 Cardiology Board Questions case decks · pediatric reference values.