What You Need to Know About At-home Pregnancy Test

At-home pregnancy tests are inexpensive and convenient. You just need to buy the pregnancy test kit and put a few drops of urine in the test well on the detection card. Within a couple of minutes, you will get the result—that is if you are pregnant or not.

Pregnancy test kits are based on identifying the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone in your urine. The hCG hormone is found in a woman’s body only when she is pregnant.

How do at-home pregnancy test kits work?

An at-home pregnancy test kit looks for HCG in your body. Since it tests urine, your pregnancy test will come positive if HCG is detected in your urine by the test kit. These test kits are about 99% accurate. In some cases, if you performed the test incorrectly, or waited too long or too short, you may get inaccurate results. 

The body needs at least 10 days to develop the hCG hormone after conception. As the pregnancy progresses, the amount of hCG in the body increases. Therefore, if you test too early, the kit will probably not be able to detect HCG in the urine and may give a false-negative result.

How to perform the test?

Every pregnancy kit comes with an instruction manual; read it carefully. Every brand of test kit has a different method of testing. However, there are certain common things that you should follow while taking a home pregnancy test.

• Always use the first urine of the day for testing.

• Wake up in the morning and before doing anything else pass urine and take the test.

• Do not drink water before the test. A sip of water is fine if you are very thirsty. However, drinking lots of water will dilute your urine and the test may not be able to identify the hCG hormone in your urine.

• Try to use the ‘midstream’ urine.

• After peeing in your pregnancy kit, place the kit on a flat surface.

• Read the instructions to know the duration you need to wait before the results appear.

• Usually, only a single line appears if you are not pregnant.

• Two lines appear to indicate you are pregnant. Even a faint second line means you are pregnant.

• If your test kit gives a negative result, you can test again after 3-5 days.

What next?

A home pregnancy kit is a reliable way to know if you are pregnant. However, if you got a faint second line, your doctor may want to do a blood pregnancy test at the clinic. Once you come to know about your pregnancy, start taking folic acid supplements. Also, scheduling your prenatal visits is extremely important.

At-home pregnancy kits are simple and inexpensive. It saves you the effort to go to a clinic to get your pregnancy test. You just need to follow the instructions and you’ll have the result with you in no time.