Tracheomalacia – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Tracheomalacia 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. Spells in a preterm lung
2. Like a seal
3. Never quite clear
4. Blue and limp
5. Worse on the inhaler
6. Seeing it move
7. A clean report
8. What is pressing
9. Was it the operation
10. The left lower lobe
11. The sling’s partner
12. Quieter, not gone
13. Four chests this year
14. Who goes first
15. A pneumatic splint
16. Two spells too many
17. The scaffold question
18. What lies ahead

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Spasm of the small airways from his lung disease, Spasm of the vocal cords triggered by acid reflux, A cough that never settles between the attacks, Reflux of milk into the larynx causing laryngospasm, A chest film taken during expiration, The ventilator pressure held the soft airway open, A repeat bronchoscopy in six months’ time, No, it developed abnormally alongside the gullet, A mucus plug persisting after a viral infection, A haemangioma just below the vocal cords, Asthma that was masked before the operation, An antibody deficiency that the tests have missed, A 6-month-old who is thriving with a barking cough, Continuous positive pressure to hold the airway open.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Spells that answer to pressure and not to oxygen are airways collapsing.
• The seal bark is the trachea folding in on its own cough.
• Croup comes and goes; a floppy trachea stays between the colds.
• A dying spell is the trachea shutting completely: treat it as an emergency.
• In a floppy trachea, the bronchodilator takes away the little stiffness left.
• Watch the trachea breathe: flexible scope, spontaneous breathing.

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 Respiratory case decks · pediatric reference values.