Heart Failure in Infancy and Cardiomyopathy – 18 Board-Style Cases with Answers

What this deck covers

Heart Failure in Infancy and Cardiomyopathy 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. What the students should feel for
2. Failing without a sound
3. Not following the usual course
4. The colic that was not colic
5. Fast for weeks before he was ill
6. Thick now, thinner later
7. Up it grows, down it fades
8. Thick heart, floppy baby
9. Twelve years after treatment
10. Full veins, normal pump
11. What to add, and in what order
12. What the adult ward would give
13. Getting through the cold months
14. When the medicines run out
15. Sick, and slower than usual
16. Somewhere between the two
17. Who else needs a scan
18. Cold to the elbows now

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Swelling of the eyelids and the backs of the hands, Dilated cardiomyopathy, The presence of wheeze, Inherited muscle disease presenting in infancy, of, Sepsis, A storage disorder, in, Congenital hypothyroidism, in, Radiation given to the chest during treatment, Restrictive cardiomyopathy, A calcium channel blocker of the rate-slowing type, Prophylactic antibiotics through the winter months, Refer for transplantation assessment, Worsening of his underlying condition, A single blood test for the whole family.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Feel for the liver and write down the centimetres. It is the observation chart of infant heart failure.
• Failing, and silent. When the heart makes no noise, suspect the muscle.
• Day four and still going downhill? Feel the liver and look at the heart on the film.
• Colic that comes with pallor and sweating is angina until the tracing says otherwise.
• A rate that never varies is a rhythm, not a reaction. Fix it and the muscle may recover.
• Thick at birth after a diabetic pregnancy usually means thinner by six months.

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.