Having a Baby – Testing at Home
For those women who are planning on having a baby, testing at home is easy, convenient, and affordable and gives you privacy to react to the result however you want to. This article gives some tips on how to take home pregnant tests, how they work, where some women go wrong and get false results and how to make having a baby, testing at home and the start of a pregnancy run as smoothly as possible! There are a large number of brands of tests you can buy from pharmacies, stores, and even on-line. Some are more sensitive than others so can be used sooner, some are digital as opposed to working out what certain lines indicate, some are more expensive. Make sure you get a test that suits you, that is not out of date and perhaps get more than one so that you can re-test if you need to!
Why is a home pregnancy test more likely to be accurate if I wait until a missed period?
When the fertilized egg reaches the uterus and attaches to the lining the body recognizes it is pregnant and starts making a hormone called hCG also known as the pregnancy hormone, because it is only in your body when you are pregnant. At first hCG levels in your urine are very low. There are some tests that claim they are more sensitive and can detect low amounts of hCG but the earlier you test the less accurate your result might be. It is possible to get a negative result just because you did not have enough hCG in your urine for the test to detect. hCG does rapidly increase though so by the time you reach the day around which your period should have started, there should be enough hCG for most home tests to be able to correctly detect and give a positive result.
I have taken a home pregnancy test and I have a faint line, what does that mean?
Home pregnancy tests are a great thing for women who think they may be pregnant; you have the opportunity to test yourself at home in privacy. But sometimes it can be difficult to know what a result means or your emotions can get in the way of correctly interpreting a result. If this is something you are worried about you can opt to use digital pregnancy tests as these will give you your results in words that you do not have to struggle to read. However if you have chosen a test that gives a result window where lines or a line is meant to appear make sure you read the instructions very carefully.
Pregnancy Test – False Positive
A false positive pregnancy test result means that it detected HCG in the urine. HCG is the hormone the tests look for that indicate pregnancy, it is formed when the embryo attaches to the uterus and comes from the placenta. It is very rare to get a false positive reading as these tests are 99% accurate but there are possible reasons why the result may be a false one.
