When to take a pregnancy test?

Posted by Alberta Dowse on October 23, 2008 · Leave a Comment

When faced out with a missed period or even with a late one, most women become tense and impatient to find out if the reason is a pregnancy or not and they hurry to take pregnancy test for clearing up the problem. Others symptoms as well can send them to a pregnancy test, but there are also many women who although they don’t have any such symptoms, still take pregnancy tests (only for their tranquility). However, there is always a big question that usually becomes even a problem: when to take the pregnancy test?.

The moment you should take a pregnancy test depends on the test type you decide to use. There are 2 possible types of pregnancy tests: blood or urine tests. Blood tests are those which can be taken only in a clinic, and because of this and its high price most women renounce of them, choosing a home pregnancy test. However, both of them are working by the same principle: they have to detect the presence of hCG in a woman’s body and that is possible only when it has a certain level. There are also two major differences(regarding the moment of taking them so they can give an accurate answer) – a blood test can be taken earlier than an urine one because it can detect a lower level of hCG – and the other difference is in way of taking them.

Home pregnancy tests, urine tests, are recommended to be taken 2 weeks after the ovulation. Certainly, many of you have heard that implantation occurs 7 days after conception, but there are many research findings which indicate that a hCG could appear (even if implantation took place) – 6-12 days after ovulation. So if you get a negative result it doesn’t mean you are not pregnant, because if the hCG doesn’t exist in your body at the moment you take the test, it doesn’t mean it won’t appear in the next few days. But, as you can see, sometimes you can find out if you are pregnant even in the sixth day after ovulation, because starting this day the hCG could already appear in your body and the pregnancy test could detect it without any problem.

When taking a pregnancy test earlier than doctors recommend, you should take care of some steps, so you can get an accurate result. Firstly, when you buy a pregnancy test, make sure it’s a sensitive one, because those more sensitive the tests are, they can easier detect a lower level of hCG (so it can detect the presence of hCG and tell you an accurate result earlier than a less sensitive one could). Then, you should also be very careful and follow step by step all the test’s directions.

If the pregnancy test gives you a negative answer but you have more and more symptoms which tell you the reverse, you should see a doctor, because, in the long run, the home pregnancy tests accuracy is of 98-99% and you could be one of this 1%.