Headache and Migraine in Children — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Headache and Migraine in Children 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. Curtains closed, then sleep
2. The trainee’s doubt
3. It rarely helps
4. Ibuprofen is not enough
5. A tablet before school, in case
6. Only when he coughs
7. Worse every week, and clumsier
8. Grey vision on standing
9. Eighteen hours and still vomiting
10. Six a month, and missing school
11. The inhaler in his bag
12. Zigzags for twenty minutes
13. She would like to try the pill
14. Pale, with a sore tummy, six times
15. Clinging and refusing to walk
16. What they can change first
17. A scan for reassurance
18. Never at the weekend

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Migraine without aura, Codeine at the onset of pain, Medication overuse headache, Cervicogenic headache from poor posture at a desk, The vomiting, Idiopathic intracranial hypertension, Withdrawal from school sport, Occipital lobe seizures, Abdominal migraine, Complete avoidance of screens, Arrange computed tomography.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Ask what the child does during the headache. Going to bed in the dark is the diagnosis.
• Children’s migraine breaks two adult rules on purpose: both sides, and shorter.
• The tablet given late goes into a stomach that has stopped working. Give it at the first twinge.
• Over twelve, ibuprofen not enough, no aura problem: that is the triptan’s moment.
• Count the painkiller days, not the headache days. Fifteen a month and the cure has become the cause.
• A child whose headache lives at the back of the head and only comes when he coughs needs a scan, not reassurance.

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 Neurology case decks · pediatric reference values.