What types of pregnancy tests are there?
Suspecting that we may be pregnant, we have to verify it with a home pregnancy test or with a medical blood test.
If you are considering that you could be pregnant, it will surely be because you have experienced some symptoms associated with pregnancy : you may have felt nauseous in the morning or your period has been delayed. These two circumstances are great indicators that a pregnancy has begun but can also be due to other reasons , including a lowering of defenses or food poisoning.
The most effective way to know if you are pregnant is by taking a test. There are two types: home tests, which you can do yourself at home, and medical tests, through a blood test performed at your health center or hospital.
Index
HOME PREGNANCY TEST
They are the most commonly used pregnancy tests. You can easily find them in pharmacies and their price is between € 3 and € 10 depending on the brand . They are also easy to use and you can use it anywhere that has a toilet. The procedure is as follows: we take the pregnancy test out of its packaging, sit on the toilet and get ready to urinate, placing the indicated tip of the test under the stream of urine. In some pregnancy tests, you urinate into a glass and put the test into it instead of directly into the toilet.
Then you have to wait between 3 and 10 minutes (it will also depend on the brand of the home test ) to know the result. In stores we can find two types of pregnancy tests: traditional and digital . It has not been proven that one is more reliable than the other but they will show the result differently: while the traditional one exposes it by means of stripes on the digital it will usually say ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant’.
But how does the test know if we are in state or not? Pregnancy tests are based on the detection of a hormone (in this case in the urine, but in medical tests in the blood) called hCG that only exists if the woman undergoing the test is pregnant . The more time elapses since gestation, the more hCG hormones will be in the urine, so if we do the test too soon this hormone will still not be formed in the urine and the test will not detect it, showing us a negative when it is actually positive .
The home test has a reliability percentage of between 97 and 99% , provided it is done correctly, so it will be very important to read the instructions carefully. The waiting time to perform the test or the brand of the test will be factors that can increase or subtract the veracity of the test.
MEDICAL PREGNANCY TEST
Medical tests, as we have already pointed out, are carried out with a blood test and can only be done by a professional. They are usually carried out when the woman needs definitive confirmation that she is pregnant, for example, when the test has been negative but she continues to have symptoms of pregnancy. In the blood test there is little room for error since it is done by specialists and the hCG hormone is detected immediately in the blood (in the urine, on the contrary, it takes days).
It is less practical than the landlord in the sense that you have to make an appointment with the doctor and you cannot do it intimately in the bathroom of your house, in addition the blood can be painful unlike the landlord that does not cause any discomfort.
WHEN CAN I USE THE TEST?
If you take the pregnancy test too soon, it is very possible that in the home test you will get a false negative even though you are pregnant . Ideally, you should wait 3-4 days from the first day that your period has failed . If you opt for the medical test, it can generally tell if you are 7 to 12 days pregnant from the moment you think pregnancy has started.
Dr. Tabriella Perivolaris, Sara's mother and fan of fashion, beauty, motherhood, among others, about the female universe. Since 2018 she has been working as a copywriter, always bringing to her articles a little of her experience and experience as a mother and woman.