A lot of pathology and Physician Assistant Exam questions concern the small and large intestines. Here you see conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), ischemic bowel, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), celiac disease, and diverticulitis. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a diagnosis of exclusion after other conditions have been ruled out.

When you're preparing to take the PANCE or PANRE, you may feel like you have to know an endless amount of information. How will you ever remember all the details of so many diseases and conditions? Here, you can review some useful mnemonics that will not only help your recall as you prepare for your physician assistant exam but also improve your clinical acumen.

A common scenario you deal with clinically and for the Physician Assistant Exam (PANCE) is inadvertently finding a lung lesion on a chest radiograph. You’re looking for something, and bam! There it is. What do you do about it? You assess the lesion on the radiograph: Check the other lung findings to make sure that you’re just dealing with a pulmonary nodule.

The Physician Assistant Exam will expect you to have an understanding of cardiac conduction disorders. Take this example. Rich has been around awhile and has taught both medical residents and physician assistants. Before that, he was a med student. Rich knows that when it comes to cardiology, two of the biggest causes of consternation, angst, and pain are answering physical-exam questions and identifying heart rhythms.

The spirochete-related diseases can be debilitating and disabling to the max if they aren’t detected early, as the Physician Assistant Exam (PANCE) will expect you to know. The spirochetes are Gram-negative bacteria. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is also covered, which is caused by a Gram-negative coccobacillus, not a spirochete.

In anemia, the body has a reduced quantity of red blood cells. One of the best ways to classify anemia is by the MCV, or mean corpuscular volume, which is expressed in femtoliters (fL). The MCV helps you think about the cause of the anemia and how to evaluate for it: Microcytic anemias (low MVC, Think TAIL: thalassemia, anemia of chronic disease, iron deficiency anemia, lead poisoning.

When you're treating a non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (an NSTEMI), keep OH BATMAN in mind. The mnemonic works for treating unstable angina, too. O = oxygen: Ischemia implies oxygen deprivation, which leads to increased myocardial oxygen demand and increased myocardial work. The goal of treatment is to reduce the workload of the heart.

An APGAR score measures how well a newborn is doing at 1 and 5 minutes after birth. The five factors you evaluate just happen to line up with the last name of the doctor, Dr. Virginia Apgar, who created the scoring system. Here are the APGAR factors: A = appearance: The skin color should be pinkish. P = pulse: The pulse should be 140–160 beats per minute.

You can use the alphabetic classification system to evaluate melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer. This guide helps you determine whether a skin lesion is malignant. The mnemonic is the first five letters of the English alphabet — A, B, C, D, and E. Here are the warning signs: A = asymmetry: If one side of the lesion differs from the other, the lesion is more likely to be malignant.