The blood test for pregnancy is also known as pregnancy serum test and it is a kind of test that is meant to determine the measure of the hCG hormone that is a pregnancy hormone. This is a pregnancy hormone which is released by the placenta. It can be found in your blood and the urine 10 days after fertilization.
How can the blood pregnancy test determine pregnancy?
The advantage of the blood test is that it can determine a pregnancy faster than the home pregnancy kits. It is possible to use the test after 7 days of conception and it can accurately determine the amount of hCG of the blood. This is an important piece of information if your doctor is tracking different kinds of pregnancy problems.
You may want to have a blood pregnancy test if you have some symptoms of pregnancy, such as a late period, vomiting, pelvic pain, breast tenderness, or spotting. If you would like to get an accurate result, this is the kind of test you should have.
Is the blood test for pregnancy more reliable that the urine test?
According to the latest studies, this test is really more reliable than the urine tests. Official information says that about 6% of the negative results of urine tests could be false negative. This means that women are pregnant, although they had negative results when they took the test.
The researches regarding blood pregnancy test showed that it is possible for a woman to have a negative result at the urine test but have a positive result at the blood test. This is what the false negative refers to. In this case the mU/mI is quite high, between 11 and 97.
In case you don’t have a blood test for pregnancy but urine test, the number of false negatives could be smaller than the results estimated during the researches. Nonetheless some of the doctors are using the blood tests if women see them before four weeks passed since they had their last period, to make sure that the results are accurate.
What do the results mean?
In case you would like to know more about the blood pregnancy test you should know that during the pregnancy the hCG levels gradually rise. This is why it is possible that you will need several tests to make sure that these levels are constantly rising. If this doesn’t happen, most probably you have a high-risk pregnancy.
It is good to know about the blood test for pregnancy that after you give birth to the child the hCG levels that the blood tests are testing for should drop back to zero. This is the normal level of this hormone, and this is why it is considered to be a pregnancy hormone.
Is the blood pregnancy test reliable?
It is said that the home pregnancy kits have an accuracy of 97%. The blood test is said to be even more reliable, but that doesn’t mean that it is more sensitive. The received results could vary according to different factors, such as the technique, lab and methodology.
There are two main kinds of blood test for pregnancy: quantitative and qualitative. In case of the quantitative test you can find out the exact amount of hCG found in the blood. On the other hand, just as the name suggests, the qualitative blood pregnancy test can accurately tell if you are pregnant or not.
After learning all this information about blood test for pregnancy, you may want to have this kind of testing instead of the urine test, just because the results offered are more accurate.
