When you are trying to get pregnant or you suspect that you may be pregnant, those days leading up to your period can be agonizingly long. It just can’t come soon enough; it’s the one time in your life when you actually look forward to your period! So, you are probably tempted to get a home pregnancy test and see if it doesn’t come back positive. We’ve all done it, because we just can’t wait any longer so the few dollars for the pregnancy test seems more than worth it!

The temptation is understandable, but for many people even if you are pregnant, you will not get a positive until right around the time of your period. The reason for this is that the pregnancy hormone, known as hCG or the human chorionic gonadotropin hormone needs time to build up in your urine efficiently enough that it will be detected in your urine. This hormone is produced by the placenta, so if you know when you ovulated you may be able to test before your period. For many people, the hCG will not be detected in the blood for 10 days after fertilization and about two days after implantation. So, if you know for sure when you ovulated, you may find that a few days before your period you can test and get an accurate positive or negative result. If you aren’t sure when you ovulated, then you may have a hard time pinning down exactly when to test and you are probably better advised to wait until you miss your period.

If you’ve been tracking your ovulation and you’ve ovulated early, it is possible to get an accurate test result from a home pregnancy test as much as 10 days before your period is expected to start. This is great news, but remember that it isn’t 100% that you will get an accurate result 10 days after ovulation, this is just an estimate. Some women cannot get an accurate test result from a home pregnancy test until much later because they have lower levels of hCG or perhaps they’ve chosen a pregnancy test that requires a higher level of hCG.

The room for error is definitely there, whether it be your calculation of your ovulation or picking up a less sensitive pregnancy test so even if you test positive or negative before your period, if you miss your period you should still take another pregnancy test to ensure that the first test was accurate. Everyone’s body works a little bit differently, so be patient, and if you don’t know when you ovulated you should try as hard as you can to hold off until you miss your period, or at least pick up the two pack of home pregnancy tests to save yourself a couple bucks! With home pregnancy tests becoming more and more sensitive more women are finding it easy to get an accurate test result three to four days before their period, but that requires that they buy the right type of pregnancy test, and still, there are no guarantees.

Posted in Trying to Get Pregnant

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