Gastroschisis – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Gastroschisis in 20 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 20 cases, in order

1. Who carries the risk
2. The chromosome question
3. Watching the rest of the pregnancy
4. What the parents can expect
5. Drying out on standard fluid
6. Why the loops look that way
7. One step or several
8. Four hours after repair
9. A change of colour in the silo
10. Where the silo goes
11. Slow to work
12. Still green at four weeks
13. When milk can start
14. Growing while the gut rests
15. A yellow baby on the drip
16. Vomiting years later
17. What predicts a long stay
18. The next pregnancy
19. Growing up afterwards
20. A bulge at the scar

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 20 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Her young age, the strongest known association, Not routinely, as chromosomal problems are rare here, Serial growth scans for restriction and late loss, Most survive and do well once the bowel is returned, He has an unseen bleed into the bowel wall, It shows that a second defect is blocking the bowel, Forcing it in raises abdominal pressure dangerously, He has developed a tension pneumothorax on the right, Urgent surgical review of the bowel’s blood supply, An atresia that the contrast study has missed, Start full milk feeds to stimulate the bowel, Now, as the aspirates settle and stool has passed, Dextrose through the cannula until feeds start, Switch the fat in the drip to one based on fish oil.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Young mother, free-floating bowel: think gastroschisis, not a chromosome problem.
• Membrane and trisomy go with exomphalos; no membrane and no trisomy go with gastroschisis.
• A gastroschisis pregnancy is a watched pregnancy: growth and wellbeing, scanned regularly.
• For isolated gastroschisis the honest news is good news: most survive and do well.
• A baby with gastroschisis is not a normal baby on maintenance: the bowel surface leaks.
• Thick and matted is peel from amniotic fluid; black is dead.

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 Neonatology case decks · pediatric reference values.