OVERVIEW
This page is dedicated to organizing various examples of standardized exam questions whose answer is pheochromocytoma. While this may seem a odd practice, it is useful to see multiple examples of how pheochromocytoma will be characterized on standardized exams (namely the boards and the shelf exams). This page is not meant to be used as a traditional question bank (as all of the answers will be the same), however seeing the classic “test” characterization for a disease is quite valuable.
QUESTION EXAMPLES
Question # 1
A thin, hyperactive 40 year old female is frustrated by the inability of her physicians to help her. She has episodes of severe pounding headache, palpitations, profuse perspiration and pallor, but by the time she gets to her doctor’s office her workup is unremarkable every respect.
Question # 2
A 25 year old woman presents to the ER with a fever, urinary urgency, and dysuria. She is diagnosed with pyelonephritis and is admitted to the hospital to be treated with intravenous antibiotics. The following day she wakes up from a pounding headache. When she admitted she had normal vitals, however now her blood pressure is 215/115 mm Hg, heart rate is 120 ppm, and she is diaphoretic. She explains that she has had these attacks before and in the past she has been treated with benzodiazepines for anxiety attacks. Her symptoms later go away and her blood pressure returns to normal without any interventions. What diagnosis needs to be considered in this patient?
Page Updated: 03.08.2017