Vascular Rings – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

vascular rings 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. Noisy from birth
2. The first test
3. Defining the anatomy
4. The commonest complete ring
5. The second commonest
6. An incidental finding
7. A sling
8. The operation
9. Pressing from the front
10. Weaning
11. Not asthma
12. At bronchoscopy
13. A bulge
14. Before birth
15. Found before birth
16. Going blue with feeds
17. A hoarse voice
18. The outlook

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: Recurrent viral croup since the first winter, A posterior indentation of the oesophagus, A plain chest X-ray alone, An aberrant right subclavian artery behind the gullet, A right arch with a left ligament, Urgent surgical division of the artery, Laryngomalacia alone, with a floppy larynx, Replacing the aorta with a tube graft, Innominate artery compression, Food allergy, A higher dose of inhaled steroid, Mucus plugging only, A Kommerell diverticulum, A normal fetal pattern that resolves at birth.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Stridor from birth, worse with feeds: think vascular ring.
• Posterior indentation on a swallow: a ring.
• Plan ring surgery with imaging of vessels and airway.
• Commonest complete ring: double aortic arch.
• Right arch plus a left ligament: a complete ring.
• Aberrant right subclavian without symptoms: leave it.

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 case decks · pediatric reference values.