Round 1: Everyday conditions and the names doctors give them
Start here and start out loud. Thirteen questions, most of them a swap between a word people know and the word on a chart, and the easiest round on the page - which is exactly what an opening round is for. Allow fifteen seconds each. A team that has never done a medical round will get eight or nine of these, and that is the point: nobody enjoys a quiz that opens by proving they know nothing.
If you are hosting, read these twice and accept either word. Somebody will answer 'hives' when the question asks for urticaria and somebody else will answer 'gallstones' rather than cholelithiasis; both know the answer. The scoring argument you want to avoid is the one about spelling, so say up front that spelling does not count in a spoken round.
Two of the thirteen turn on a distinction worth teaching rather than just marking. A stye is not a chalazion, and arthralgia is not arthritis - one is a symptom, the other is a diagnosis. Both mix-ups are common enough to be worth ten extra seconds after the answer.
Q1.Urticaria is a common allergic reaction that raises red, itchy welts on the skin. What is the everyday English name for it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hives
The welts are properly called wheals, and they are raised by histamine released from mast cells, which makes the smallest blood vessels leak fluid into the skin. Shellfish, nuts, eggs and certain medicines are familiar triggers, but in long-running cases a cause is often never found at all. An individual welt is short-lived - it usually fades within a day and reappears somewhere else.
Q2.Jaundice turns the skin, the whites of the eyes and the mucous membranes yellow. Which medical term means the same thing?Tap to reveal
Answer: Icterus
The yellow is bilirubin, the pigment left over when worn-out red blood cells are broken down, backing up because the liver cannot clear it fast enough. Jaundice itself comes from the French jaune, yellow. It is common in newborns, whose liver enzymes take a few days to come up to speed, which is why a baby may spend a day or two under blue light.
Q3.Herpes zoster, caused by the varicella zoster virus, is known to most people by which name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Shingles
It is chickenpox coming back. After the first infection the virus stays dormant in nerve roots for decades and can reactivate along a single nerve, which is why the rash forms a band down one side of the body and stops at the midline. About one person in three in the United States gets it in a lifetime, around a million cases a year. The first shingles vaccine arrived in 2006 and was withdrawn from the American market in 2020; the far more effective Shingrix, licensed in 2017, is the one now recommended.
Q4.Which medical term names a visible enlargement of the thyroid gland in the neck?Tap to reveal
Answer: A goiter
Most often the cause is iodine deficiency. The thyroid needs iodine to make the hormones T3 and T4, and starved of it the gland grows in the attempt. Adding iodine to table salt, which the United States began doing in 1924, made the condition rare across much of the world. It is a sign rather than a disease: a goiter can sit alongside an overactive thyroid, an underactive one or a perfectly normal one.
Q5.What is the medical term for the presence of gallstones in the gallbladder?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cholelithiasis
Read it in pieces: chole- is bile, lith- is stone, -iasis is a condition. Most gallstones are made largely of cholesterol and most never cause any trouble, turning up by accident on a scan done for something else. The pain starts when a stone blocks a duct, and the standard treatment removes the gallbladder rather than the stones.
Q6.A chalazion, also called a meibomian gland lipogranuloma, is a firm painless cyst on which part of the body?Tap to reveal
Answer: The eyelid
An oil gland inside the eyelid blocks and the trapped contents form a firm, usually painless lump. Greek supplied the name: chalazion means a small hailstone. It is not a stye - a stye is an infection at the lash line, it hurts, and it comes up within days, while a chalazion is sterile and can sit there for weeks.
Q7.True or false: arthralgia is a severe disorder of the heart.Tap to reveal
Answer: False - it means joint pain
Arthr- is joint and -algia is pain, the same ending as in neuralgia and myalgia. The useful contrast is with arthritis, where -itis means inflammation: arthritis is an inflamed joint, while arthralgia is only the symptom of pain, which may or may not have inflammation behind it.
Q8.What does a person or animal with albinism lack?Tap to reveal
Answer: Melanin - the pigment that colours skin, hair and eyes
The name comes from the Latin albus, white. The body cannot make normal amounts of melanin, usually because of a fault in a gene for one of the enzymes that produce it. The eyes matter more than the skin does: melanin is needed for the retina to develop properly, so albinism almost always brings poor vision and involuntary eye movement. The eyes are not truly red either - they are pale blue or violet, and look pink only when light bounces back off the blood vessels behind them.
Q9.Which condition is the death and decay of body tissue caused by infection or by a loss of blood supply?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gangrene
Blood carries oxygen, and tissue cut off from it long enough dies and is then colonized by bacteria. Diabetes, severe frostbite and arterial disease are the usual routes to it. One very old treatment has come back: sterile maggots eat dead tissue and leave living tissue alone, and in 2004 American regulators cleared them for sale as a medical device for wounds that will not heal.
Q10.The sphygmomanometer, devised by Samuel Siegfried Karl Ritter von Basch in 1881, measures what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Blood pressure
The name is Greek: sphygmos, pulse, plus manometer, a pressure gauge. Von Basch's device measured the pressure needed to flatten an artery. The inflatable arm cuff still used today came from Scipione Riva-Rocci in 1896, and the trick of listening for the sounds that appear and then vanish as the cuff deflates came from Nikolai Korotkoff in 1905.
Q11.What is the name for the sound made by blood moving through a damaged or abnormal heart valve?Tap to reveal
Answer: A murmur
A healthy heart makes two short sounds as its valves snap shut. A murmur is the longer whoosh of turbulent flow, heard when a valve is narrowed or leaking. It is not automatically bad news - innocent murmurs are found in a large share of healthy children and disappear as they grow. Doctors have been listening for them since Rene Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816.
Q12.Which medical term describes the crackling or grating sound made when two rough surfaces inside the body rub together?Tap to reveal
Answer: Crepitus
From the Latin crepitus, a rattle. It covers several different noises: the grating of worn joint surfaces, the crackle of air trapped under the skin, and the fine crackling of lungs heard through a stethoscope. Knees that click on the stairs are usually harmless - crepitus matters clinically only when pain or swelling comes with it.
Q13.Pre-eclampsia is a medical condition associated with which state?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pregnancy
It appears after about the twentieth week as raised blood pressure with protein in the urine or other signs of organ strain, and the fault starts in the placenta rather than in the blood vessels themselves. Untreated it can progress to eclampsia, which means seizures. The only definitive cure is delivery, which is why it is watched so closely, and low-dose aspirin is now offered to women at high risk to lower the odds of it developing.
Round 2: The brain, the nerves and the conditions named after people
Harder, and the round where the myths live. A great deal of what the public believes about neurological and psychiatric illness comes from television, and three of these questions exist to take that apart: schizophrenia is not a split personality, Tourette syndrome is mostly not swearing, and fibromyalgia is not diagnosed by a blood test because no blood test for it exists.
The eponyms are worth a word of their own. Conditions get named after the doctor who first described them clearly, not after the person who had one, and the dates tell you how recently medicine learned to see them: Parkinson in 1817, Meniere in 1861, Down in 1866, Tourette in 1885. Down syndrome makes the point twice over, because the chromosome behind it was not found for another ninety-three years.
Four questions here are about a single illness, fibromyalgia, and they are grouped deliberately. It is the best short case study on the page of how a diagnosis changes: dismissed, then accepted into mainstream American medicine in 1987, then defined by a tender-point examination that has since been abandoned, and now understood as a problem of pain signalling rather than of muscle.
Q1.Which mental illness is defined by persistent disturbance in the perception or expression of reality, with delusions, hallucinations and disorganized or catatonic behavior?Tap to reveal
Answer: Schizophrenia
Emil Kraepelin separated it from mood disorders in the 1890s under the name dementia praecox, and Eugen Bleuler renamed it schizophrenia in 1908, from the Greek for split mind. He meant a splitting apart of thought, emotion and perception within one person - not a split personality, which is a different diagnosis entirely and the most stubborn myth about this illness. There is still no blood test or scan that makes the diagnosis.
Q2.Which inner-ear disorder brings attacks of vertigo, fluctuating hearing loss, a feeling of fullness in the ear and tinnitus?Tap to reveal
Answer: Meniere's disease
The French physician Prosper Meniere described the pattern in 1861 and, against the thinking of his day, placed the fault in the inner ear rather than in the brain. Attacks come in bouts lasting minutes to hours and are associated with a build-up of fluid in the labyrinth. What ultimately causes that build-up is still unsettled.
Q3.Which disorder, from a Greek word meaning a failure to put in order, is a loss of muscular coordination caused by damage to the parts of the nervous system that control movement?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ataxia
Greek a-, without, plus taxis, order. The damage is usually in the cerebellum. It can be inherited, as in Friedreich's ataxia, or acquired after a stroke, multiple sclerosis, a tumour or heavy drinking - alcohol produces a temporary version of exactly this, which is why a roadside test asks someone to walk a straight line.
Q4.Which disorder is an abnormal build-up of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hydrocephalus
Greek for water on the head. Cerebrospinal fluid is produced continuously and has to drain, so when the path is obstructed, pressure rises. The old name misleads in adults, whose skull cannot expand to accommodate it. The standard treatment is a shunt, a thin tube that carries the fluid away to the abdomen, and it was among the first genuinely successful operations on the brain.
Q5.True or false: involuntary swearing is the most common tic in Tourette syndrome.Tap to reveal
Answer: False - it affects only about one patient in ten to fifteen
Tourette syndrome is named for Georges Gilles de la Tourette, who described nine patients in 1885 while working under Charcot in Paris. Tics usually begin in childhood and often ease in adult life. Coprolalia, the involuntary swearing television always shows, occurs in 10 to 15 per cent of cases; blinking, throat-clearing, sniffing and shrugging are far more typical, and echolalia, repeating what someone else has just said, is commoner than obscenity.
Q6.Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of which chromosome?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chromosome 21
The condition is therefore also called trisomy 21. John Langdon Down described it in 1866, but the extra chromosome was not identified until 1959, by Jerome Lejeune's team in Paris - one of the first times a human condition was traced to a specific chromosome.
Q7.One of its discoverers called it the worst disease you can get: an inherited illness in which the patient becomes totally unable to sleep, even with sleeping pills, and then suffers hallucinations, dementia and death. Name it.Tap to reveal
Answer: Fatal familial insomnia
It is a prion disease, caused by a misfolded protein that induces other copies of the same protein to misfold, and it destroys the thalamus, the part of the brain that governs sleep. An Italian family whose members had been dying this way for generations led to its description in the medical literature in 1986. Fewer than a hundred families worldwide are known to carry the mutation.
Q8.Which rare and incurable brain disease has a variant known to the public as mad cow disease, contracted by eating contaminated beef?Tap to reveal
Answer: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
Strictly, mad cow disease is the cattle illness, BSE; the human form caught from infected meat is variant CJD, and fewer than 250 people worldwide have ever been diagnosed with it. The far commoner form is sporadic CJD, which strikes roughly one person in a million each year for no identified reason. Both are prion diseases, as is kuru, which spread among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea through funeral rites in which the dead were eaten.
Q9.People with this disorder have a persistent urge to eat things that are not food, such as dirt, paper, clay or chalk. What is it called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pica
Named from pica, the Latin for magpie, a bird with a reputation for swallowing anything. It appears most often in pregnancy and in small children, and it is strongly linked to iron deficiency - so strongly that the craving frequently stops once the deficiency is corrected. A specific craving for ice has a name of its own, pagophagia.
Q10.In which year did the American College of Rheumatology publish the first formal diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1990
The name is stitched together from the Latin fibra, fibre, and the Greek myo, muscle, and algos, pain. Criteria mattered because patients had spent years being told the pain was imaginary; a landmark 1987 review in the Journal of the American Medical Association is usually taken as the moment mainstream American medicine accepted it as a real illness, and the 1990 criteria gave rheumatologists a definition they could agree on.
Q11.True or false: fibromyalgia can be confirmed with a simple blood test.Tap to reveal
Answer: False
There is no laboratory test and no scan for it. The diagnosis is clinical: widespread pain lasting more than three months, with fatigue and disturbed sleep, once other explanations have been excluded. Blood tests are ordered precisely to exclude those others, such as an underactive thyroid or rheumatoid arthritis, and a normal result is part of the picture rather than a contradiction of it.
Q12.Among the eighteen tender points once used to diagnose fibromyalgia, which of these was not one: the knees, the hips, the shoulder blades or the ankles?Tap to reveal
Answer: The ankles
The 1990 criteria listed nine pairs of points - the base of the skull, the lower neck, the trapezius, above the shoulder blade, the second rib, the outer elbow, the buttock, the hip and the inner knee - and required tenderness in at least eleven of them. That examination is no longer the standard: criteria published from 2010 onwards dropped the thumb-pressure test in favour of a map of where the pain is and how severe the accompanying symptoms are.
Q13.True or false: fibromyalgia is now understood as a disorder of the central nervous system.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
The muscles themselves look normal under examination. The current explanation is central sensitization: the spinal cord and brain amplify pain signals, so ordinary pressure is registered as pain. That also explains why the medicines that help are not anti-inflammatories but drugs acting on nerve signalling, such as duloxetine, milnacipran and pregabalin.
Round 3: Plagues and pandemics that changed history
The strongest round for a general audience, because it is as much history as medicine and every question has a story attached. Fourteen of them, running roughly in order from 430 BC to the 1980s, and they can be played as a straight round or as a timeline game in which teams put six of the outbreaks in order rather than naming them.
Two answers deserve the extra thirty seconds. The Black Death question is the one where a quiz book from twenty years ago would have hedged, because historians spent the 1980s and 1990s arguing that the medieval plague spread too quickly to have been a bacterium - an argument closed in 2011 when Yersinia pestis DNA was recovered from the teeth of victims buried in London in 1348. And the Spanish flu was not Spanish, a detail that is really a lesson about wartime censorship rather than about influenza.
The round ends on a definition rather than a disease, because the word pandemic gets used loosely. It means an infectious disease spreading across many countries at once, which is why obesity and cancer, whatever their toll, do not qualify - and knowing that is more useful than any single date on this list.
Q1.The first pandemic recorded in any detail broke out in 430 BC. During which war did it strike?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Peloponnesian War
The Plague of Athens killed perhaps a quarter of the people packed inside the city walls during the Spartan siege, Pericles among them. The historian Thucydides caught it, survived and wrote the first clinical description of an epidemic that we have - detailed enough that doctors still argue over the diagnosis. Typhoid fever, typhus and smallpox have all been proposed, and DNA recovered from an Athenian burial pit pointed to typhoid.
Q2.Which Roman emperor is said to have died of the Antonine Plague, the epidemic that carries his family name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Marcus Aurelius
The plague arrived with soldiers returning from the eastern frontier in 165 and killed millions over the following fifteen years; the physician Galen described it, which is why it is also called the Plague of Galen. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus died at Vindobona, today's Vienna, in 180, and ancient writers blamed the epidemic. Smallpox is the usual modern guess at what the disease actually was.
Q3.Which epidemic swept through Asia and Europe in the 1300s and became the deadliest pandemic in recorded history?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Black Death
It reached Europe in 1347 and by 1351 had killed somewhere between a quarter and a half of the continent, tens of millions of people. Contemporaries did not call it the Black Death - they wrote of the great mortality or simply the pestilence. The name came centuries later, from the Latin atra mors, which means both black and terrible.
Q4.Which bacterium is now accepted as the cause of the Black Death?Tap to reveal
Answer: Yersinia pestis
It is named for Alexandre Yersin, who isolated it during the Hong Kong outbreak of 1894. For years some historians argued that the medieval epidemic spread too fast and in the wrong seasons to be this bacterium and must have been something viral. That argument is over: in 2011 researchers recovered and sequenced Yersinia pestis DNA from the teeth of plague victims buried in London in 1348 and 1349.
Q5.Which form of plague produces black patches on the skin, caused by bleeding beneath it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Septicemic plague
There are three forms of the same infection. Bubonic plague swells the lymph nodes into buboes; septicemic plague floods the bloodstream, wrecks the clotting system and blackens skin and fingertips; pneumonic plague settles in the lungs and is the only form that passes directly from person to person through the air, as well as the fastest to kill.
Q6.True or false: plague can still be cured today.Tap to reveal
Answer: True - with antibiotics, if treatment starts early enough
Streptomycin, gentamicin and doxycycline all work, and the first plague vaccine was produced by Waldemar Haffkine in 1897. The disease never went away: the United States records a handful of cases most years, almost all in the rural Southwest, and Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo report far more. Untreated it is still frequently fatal, and delay is what kills.
Q7.Which disease has caused seven pandemics since 1817 and is still causing epidemics today?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cholera
The seventh began in Indonesia in 1961 and has never ended. It kills by dehydration, sometimes within hours, and it is one of the few great killers that is straightforward to prevent, because clean water and sanitation do it. The proof arrived in 1854, when John Snow traced a London outbreak to a single public pump on Broad Street and had the handle removed.
Q8.Which American president died of cholera in 1849, only 103 days after leaving office - the shortest retirement in the history of the job?Tap to reveal
Answer: James K. Polk
He died in Nashville on 15 June 1849. The second great cholera pandemic was moving up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys that year and killed thousands in the river cities in the same months.
Q9.Which louse-borne disease killed millions in Russia, Poland and Romania during and after the First World War?Tap to reveal
Answer: Typhus
Body lice carry Rickettsia prowazekii, so typhus follows war, famine and crowding - Napoleon lost more men to it in Russia than to the fighting. Between 1918 and 1922 it killed an estimated two to three million people in the former Russian Empire. The bacterium is named for two scientists, Howard Ricketts and Stanislaus von Prowazek, both of whom died of the disease while studying it.
Q10.Which outbreak killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919, making it the deadliest in modern history?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Spanish flu
It was an H1N1 influenza and it was not Spanish. Spain stayed neutral in the war and did not censor its newspapers, so Spanish reports were the ones the rest of the world read and the name stuck. What made it exceptional was whom it killed: ordinary influenza takes the very old and the very young, while this strain killed healthy adults in their twenties and thirties in enormous numbers.
Q11.In 1952 the United States recorded its worst ever year for which disease?Tap to reveal
Answer: Polio
It was the worst polio year on record in the United States, though not the country's worst epidemic - the 1918 influenza pandemic killed around 675,000 Americans. Close to 58,000 cases were reported that year, more than 3,000 people died and many thousands more were left with some degree of paralysis. Swimming pools and cinemas closed each summer. Jonas Salk's vaccine was declared safe and effective in April 1955, and American cases fell by more than ninety per cent within five years.
Q12.Which disease, carried to the Americas by Europeans, devastated the Cherokee and many other Native American nations?Tap to reveal
Answer: Smallpox
Peoples with no previous exposure had no immunity, and epidemics repeatedly killed a third or more of a community; an outbreak among the Cherokee in 1738 is thought to have killed roughly half of them. Smallpox is also the one human disease deliberately wiped out: the last natural case was in Somalia in 1977, and the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980.
Q13.Which disease, whose virus crossed into humans in central Africa, was first recognized by doctors in 1981?Tap to reveal
Answer: AIDS
American health officials reported five cases of a rare pneumonia in previously healthy young men in Los Angeles on 5 June 1981, and that notice is generally taken as the start. HIV itself was identified in 1983, and genetic work later traced it to a chimpanzee virus that crossed into people around the start of the twentieth century. Treatment has changed the disease beyond recognition: on modern antiretroviral drugs, HIV suppressed to undetectable levels cannot be passed on sexually.
Q14.True or false: cancer is classed as a pandemic.Tap to reveal
Answer: False
A pandemic is an infectious disease spreading across many countries at the same time. Cancer kills about ten million people a year worldwide, but it does not pass from person to person, so the word does not apply - epidemiologists call it a non-communicable disease. A few cancers do have infectious causes, cervical cancer from HPV being the clearest, but the cancer itself is not catching.
Round 4: Infections, parasites and the things you can catch
Five questions, and the round to put late in the evening when a table has warmed up, because three of them are genuinely unpleasant and that is the entertainment. Read the Guinea worm question slowly. It also happens to be the most hopeful item on the page: an infection that was causing three and a half million cases a year in the mid-1980s has been pushed down to ten cases in 2025 without any vaccine or drug at all.
The other reason for this round is that it carries two corrections. Ebola has been treatable since the late 2010s, which a quiz book from 2005 would have flatly denied, and SARS is the reason the virus behind COVID-19 is formally named SARS-CoV-2 - the family was known, and named, seventeen years before the pandemic that made it famous.
Q1.Which viral disease, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, causes red eyes, bleeding and organ failure?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ebola
It was identified in 1976 near the Ebola River, and the team picked the river's name deliberately so that the village at the centre of the outbreak would not carry the stigma. The death rate has run from about a quarter to ninety per cent depending on the strain and the care available. The old line that nothing can be done is out of date: a vaccine, Ervebo, was approved in 2019, and two antibody treatments are now in use.
Q2.Which respiratory epidemic broke out in southern China in 2002 and spread to nearly thirty countries?Tap to reveal
Answer: SARS
Severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a coronavirus that most likely reached people through civets sold in live-animal markets. The final toll was 8,096 cases and 774 deaths, and it was contained by July 2003 through isolation and contact tracing alone, with no vaccine and no specific drug. Its close relative caused the COVID-19 pandemic seventeen years later, which is why the later virus was formally named SARS-CoV-2.
Q3.Which intestinal parasite, usually caught from undercooked meat, can live in a human digestive tract for twenty years and grows a long segmented body?Tap to reveal
Answer: A tapeworm
The beef tapeworm can reach ten metres and survive for decades, often with no symptom beyond segments appearing in the stool, and a single dose of praziquantel clears it. The pork tapeworm is the dangerous relative: swallow its eggs rather than its larvae and cysts can settle in the brain, which is one of the leading causes of adult-onset epilepsy in much of the world.
Q4.Which spore-forming bacterium can be caught from infected animal tissue, lie dormant for years, and kill quickly when its spores are inhaled?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anthrax
The Greeks named it after coal, anthrakis, for the black sore that forms on infected skin. It has a place in the history of science too: in 1876 Robert Koch used anthrax to prove for the first time that one specific microbe causes one specific disease. The skin form usually responds to antibiotics, while the inhaled form is the one that killed five people in the letters sent through the American mail in 2001.
Q5.Which infection, caught by swallowing water fleas carrying its larvae, produces metre-long worms that emerge through the skin, usually at the foot?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dracunculiasis, or Guinea worm disease
The name is Latin for little dragon. The treatment has not changed in thousands of years: the worm is wound out a few centimetres a day around a small stick, a process that takes weeks, and an image some believe lies behind the snake-on-a-staff symbol of medicine. The eradication campaign is one of public health's quiet triumphs, taking an estimated 3.5 million cases a year in 21 countries in 1986 down to ten human cases worldwide in 2025, using water filters and patient education rather than any medicine.
Round 5: Which medicine treats which condition
Nine questions on drugs whose brand names are household words, matched to what they are actually for. This round plays well because almost everyone has a bathroom cabinet and nobody reads the leaflet, and it is where a team of non-medics can still score by reasoning: a name containing lipo is unlikely to be about anything but fat.
The pharmacology gives a few genuinely good stories. Warfarin was rat poison first, discovered in spoiled clover that made cattle bleed to death. Finasteride's effect on hair was noticed in men taking it for an enlarged prostate. Botox is the most poisonous substance known and is injected on purpose. Statins were the best-selling class of drugs in medicine for a generation and now cost a few dollars a month.
Two places where the honest answer is that medicine has moved on since these were the newest thing. Sleeping pills are no longer the first treatment recommended for insomnia - talking therapy for insomnia is - and donepezil is no longer the only game in Alzheimer's, since the anti-amyloid antibodies approved from 2023. As with everything on this page, this is trivia rather than advice: nobody should start, stop or change a medicine because of a quiz.
Q1.Which of these medicines treats depression: Benadryl, Augmentin, Zoloft or Darvon?Tap to reveal
Answer: Zoloft (sertraline)
Sertraline is an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, the class that also includes fluoxetine, paroxetine and citalopram; they leave more serotonin available between nerve cells. The other three names on the list are a common antihistamine, an antibiotic, and a painkiller that was withdrawn from the American market in 2010 over heart rhythm risks.
Q2.Which condition is treated with Synthroid (levothyroxine)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hypothyroidism, an underactive thyroid
Levothyroxine is a synthetic copy of thyroxine, the hormone the thyroid should be producing, so the treatment simply replaces what is missing and is usually taken for life. The commonest cause of the deficiency is Hashimoto's thyroiditis, in which the immune system attacks the gland. It is one of the most dispensed prescriptions in the United States, year after year.
Q3.Ambien (zolpidem) is prescribed for which condition?Tap to reveal
Answer: Insomnia
It works quickly and wears off quickly, which suits difficulty falling asleep better than difficulty staying asleep. Guidance has shifted since it arrived: cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is now recommended as the first treatment, with sleeping pills kept for short courses, partly because of next-morning grogginess and the strange sleepwalking behaviour the drug can produce.
Q4.Which of these medicines is used in Alzheimer's disease: Topamax, Aricept, Effexor or Lanoxin?Tap to reveal
Answer: Aricept (donepezil)
Donepezil slows the breakdown of acetylcholine, a signalling chemical that falls in Alzheimer's, and it eases symptoms for a time without stopping the disease. That was the whole state of play for two decades. The anti-amyloid antibodies approved in the United States from 2023, lecanemab and donanemab, are the first treatments shown to slow the underlying decline - modestly, and with real risks that require monitoring.
Q5.Which condition does Propecia (finasteride) treat?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hair loss
Finasteride blocks the conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, the hormone that shrinks hair follicles in male pattern baldness. The identical drug at a higher dose, sold as Proscar, treats an enlarged prostate - which is how the effect on hair was noticed in the first place, in men who were taking it for the prostate.
Q6.Which medicine is prescribed for enuresis, or bed-wetting: DDAVP, THC, Sansert or Senokot?Tap to reveal
Answer: DDAVP (desmopressin)
Desmopressin is a synthetic version of vasopressin, the hormone that tells the kidneys to concentrate urine, so a dose at bedtime means less urine overnight. The same drug treats diabetes insipidus, a condition producing enormous volumes of urine which, despite the name, has nothing to do with the diabetes involving blood sugar. In children an alarm that wakes the sleeper is usually tried before any drug.
Q7.Which of these drugs thins the blood by reducing its ability to clot: Biaxin, Coumadin, hydrochlorothiazide or Lexapro?Tap to reveal
Answer: Coumadin (warfarin)
Warfarin began as rat poison and is still sold as one. It was tracked down in spoiled sweet clover that was making cattle bleed to death, and its name combines the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which funded the work, with the coumarin it derives from. It blocks vitamin K, which the liver needs to build clotting factors, which is why patients on it need regular blood tests and a steady intake of leafy greens. Newer anticoagulants that need no monitoring have taken over much of its work.
Q8.Botox has been licensed in the United States since 2010 to prevent which condition, when it strikes on fifteen or more days a month?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chronic migraine
It is the most acutely poisonous substance known, injected in minute purified doses to stop nerves signalling to muscles. Its other licensed uses have nothing to do with wrinkles: crossed eyes and eyelid spasm, which were the original 1989 approvals, plus cervical dystonia, severe underarm sweating, an overactive bladder and muscle spasticity after a stroke.
Q9.Which of these medicines lowers cholesterol: erythromycin, Imitrex, Lipitor or Verelan?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lipitor (atorvastatin)
Atorvastatin is a statin: it blocks the liver enzyme that manufactures cholesterol, lowering LDL and with it the risk of heart attack and stroke. Lipitor was the best-selling prescription drug in the world for most of the 2000s and earned well over a hundred billion dollars before its patent expired in 2011; the all-time sales record has since passed to the arthritis drug Humira. The generic version now costs a few dollars a month.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to run 54 medical trivia questions?
About seventy minutes for the whole page, reading each question twice and allowing fifteen seconds to answer. Three of the five rounds fit comfortably into an hour with scoring and a break. If you have twenty minutes, use round one and round three: the first gets everyone answering and the second is the one people talk about afterwards.
Are these medical trivia questions too hard for a general pub quiz?
Round one is not - it is mostly a swap between a familiar word and a medical one, and an average team scores eight or nine out of thirteen. Round three is history as much as medicine and plays to the same people who are good at history rounds. Rounds two and five are where a nurse, a pharmacist or a biology teacher at the table will earn their place, which is exactly what you want from a specialist round.
Are the answers up to date?
They have been checked against current practice, and several notes exist specifically to flag where older quiz material has gone stale. Ebola has had a licensed vaccine since 2019. The eighteen tender points that once defined fibromyalgia were dropped from the diagnostic criteria after 2010. The old doubt about whether a bacterium really caused the Black Death was closed by DNA evidence in 2011. Alzheimer's treatment changed with the anti-amyloid antibodies approved from 2023.
Can I use these questions with a nursing, biology or health class?
Yes, and the notes are written with that in mind: each one gives a mechanism or a piece of history rather than just repeating the answer. Round one works as a terminology warm-up, round two suits a nervous-system unit, round three fits a public-health or history lesson, and round four is the parasitology round students remember. The page is free and there is no account to create.
Is any of this medical advice?
No. It is a quiz written for entertainment and teaching, and it describes diseases and medicines in general terms only. Nothing here applies to a particular person, a particular symptom or a particular prescription, and no one should start, stop or change a treatment because of something they read on a trivia page. That is a conversation with a doctor or a pharmacist.
Can I print these questions and answers?
Yes. Two buttons at the top of the page print it: one gives a blank question sheet to hand out, the other the same sheet with the answer key. The explanatory notes stay on the page rather than on the printout, which keeps a 54-question handout down to a few sheets of paper. It is free and there is no signup.
