Home pregnancy tests
How do home pregnancy tests work?Home pregnancy tests detect the presence of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in your urine.
This hormone is produced by cells that will develop into the placenta. It first enters your bloodstream after the fertilized egg implants in the lining of your uterus, shortly after fertilization. The amount of hCG in your body then increases rapidly over the next few weeks, Travis Benjamin Browns Jersey often doubling every two days or so. When a test detects a certain amount of the hormone, it will show you a positive result. There’s even a test that estimates the number of weeks since you conceived.
How accurate are home pregnancy tests on the day you miss your period?Most tests claim to be “greater than 99 percent accurate” and imply that you can use them as early as the day you miss your period (or sooner), but a recent study found that Authentic Tashaun Gipson Jersey some tests aren’t sensitive enough to guarantee an accurate result at that point.
Researchers evaluated pregnancy tests from three different manufacturers and found that only one brand of test (both the digital and non digital version) was 97 percent accurate in detecting pregnancy on the first day Authentic Paul Kruger Jersey of a missed menstrual period. (The amount of hCG in the urine at this time can vary a great deal from one woman to another.) The other brands correctly predicted pregnancy about half the time.
The bottom line: You’re more likely to get an accurate result if you wait a few Authentic Brian Urlacher Jersey days to a week after you expect your period before testing.
How can these tests claim to be accurate so early?According to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, a home pregnancy test can claim to be “greater than 99 percent accurate” if the manufacturer simply demonstrates that the test performs as well in the lab as an existing test more than 99 percent of the time. Today’s home pregnancy tests are more sensitive than previous products, so it’s not surprising that manufacturers are able to make this claim, but it has Authentic Desmond Bryant Jersey nothing to do with a test’s ability to detect pregnancy at the time of a missed period.
How can I tell which tests are the most sensitive?It’s not easy. New products come out frequently, and manufacturers can make improvements at any time.
But some package inserts provide information about a test’s sensitivity that is, they report the lowest concentration of hCG in milli International Units per milliliter (mIU/ml) of urine Billy Cundiff Browns Jersey that the test can detect. For example, a pregnancy test that claims to be able to detect hCG at 20 mIU/ml theoretically should be more sensitive than one that claims to detect it at 50 mIU/ml.
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