Pregnancy Test Accuracy

Ok, your period had delay and you suspect that you are pregnant, now what?  Are you feeling any pregnancy symptoms? May be no. Now you have two options:

you can forget it and let time go on and do nothing or you can go to the pharmacy and by  a  home pregnancy test  or (HPT)  for short, but before you spend your money in a HPT, to test for pregnancy, I want to point out to  you  some essentials details  that you should know about  pregnancy test, their results and accuracy of the test .  First how does a pregnancy test work?  I want to present to you some of the agents in your body that are responsible for the pregnancy indicators or pregnancy symptoms, certainly if we want to test something we need to do some measurement, and for pregnancy, we need to measure something that is in your body only when you are pregnant and this is a hormone that is presented in your urine or blood. This hormone is only produced when a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus, commonly this happens above six days after the egg is fertilized,  keep this as an indication of when to test for pregnancy.  There is a minority of women (said the 10%) that implantation occurs later after the first day of missed period.  This hormone the famous pregnancy hormone with an “easy to remember name”:  Human Chorionic Gonadotropin   but as I said before is a lot easier to call it pregnancy hormone or (hCG), the amount of it in your body grows each day when you are pregnant so this is our measurement agent. Where we can find it? Well it can be found in your urine or in your blood. And always is present when you are pregnant, but you can get it also in some medication, so be aware.

Home Pregnancy Test (HPT) commonly measure hCG in the urine, remember the pregnancy hormone, by detecting the presence or absence of the pregnancy hormone they provide a cheap and reasonably accurate mean to know if you are pregnant, it can detect pregnancy even when no symptoms of pregnancy are present or no, if it is used correctly and at the right time, yes !, the results and accuracy depends on the time you take the test, best results about one week after the last period missed.

Blood pregnancy test usually is administered by a professional and it comes in twofold:

1_ A qualitative pregnancy test, it answer if the pregnancy hormone (hCG)   is present or not in your body, and it is as precise as a urine test. Negative pregnancy test results are more common in the very early stage with the pregnancy test accuracy improving whit the time

2_ While a quantitative test for pregnancy   tells you with more precision how much pregnancy hormone (hCG ) there is in your blood .  This test is the one with the best pregnancy test accuracy.

As always, when you measure something, the results are not absolute, so you can get misleading results sometimes,  what they call negative pregnancy test and other people call or negative test pregnancy they refers to results that said no when is a yes or vice versa,  my best advice in this case, repeat the test, the average between 3 or more results is closest to the reality than only one result.

How to improve the pregnancy test accuracy?  Here are some points to consider:

1_ Follow   instructions carefully, and wait 10 min to read the results.

2_ Test your   your urine before taking any liquid or food early in the morning.

3_ Best results   are obtained one week after a missed period. But remember that the hCG  levels  grows  almost exponentially,  that means you get better results as time goes by.

4_ Pick a brand that have a control indicator on it, that tell you if the test was correct or not, this eliminates false results.

5_ Double check   if you are taking any medication that contains hCG these medication can give false results because they put hCG in your body from an external source.

6_ The most important factor to consider is the human factor; there are small differences in the ovulation time for different women and it going to show as variations on the implantation of the fertilized egg in the woman uterus (about 10 % of the population). How to overcome it? Repeat the test to improve the accuracy of the results.

7_ The brand of the home pregnancy test (HPT ) can affect  the accuracy of the test,  look for a brand with the good results at 7 to 9 days after the missing period.

Pregnancy test accuracy depends of various  factors  that can affect the results of the test so when you take one consider the possibilities when you interpret the results.