Meningitis and Encephalitis in Children — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Meningitis and Encephalitis 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. Six days old and turbid fluid
2. Shocked, and the tray is out
3. One further drug with the first dose
4. Reading the fluid
5. The PCR came back positive
6. Not recognising his mother
7. Whether she can go home on tablets
8. Purple spots under the glass
9. Everyone else in the house
10. Back to his usual self
11. The fever came back on day six
12. Two days of amoxicillin first
13. Two weeks after the virus
14. Mute, chewing, and writhing
15. The second time in eighteen months
16. A ring on his thigh in the summer
17. The tray is ready
18. Whether he is completely better

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Ceftriaxone alone, Bacterial meningitis, Give oral amoxicillin, A meningococcal vaccine for the whole household, A formal hearing test within four weeks of discharge, A drug fever from the cephalosporin, A throat swab, Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, Tick-borne encephalitis, for.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Under a month, add the amoxicillin. Listeria does not read the cephalosporin leaflet.
• A shocked child gets the antibiotic before anything with a needle that is not a cannula.
• The steroid has a twelve-hour window. Miss it and it does nothing but harm.
• Read the glucose as a ratio, never as a number. Send the blood glucose with the tap or you cannot.
• The PCR is not there to tell you what he has. It is there to let you stop treating what he has not.
• Meningitis hurts the head. Encephalitis changes the child. When the child has changed, start aciclovir.

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.