Pregnancy Signs & Symptoms, Week by Week Pregnancy Guide

In case you are asking how accurate are pregnancy tests it is good to know that the home pregnancy tests act by measuring the hCG urine levels.

This stands for human chorionic gonadotropin and it is a kind of hormone produced by the placenta.

Information about pregnancy test accuracy

Usually the doctors suggest you wait until the beginning of your missed period to test to get an accurate result. This is about two weeks after conception. Nonetheless there are some tests that are more sensible and you can use them earlier. If you use the test correctly, the home kits are 97% accurate.

Sensitivity

The sensitivity when it comes to the accuracy of the pregnancy test refers to how soon you can use the given test. The hCG concentrations are measured in mIU. The tests with a sensitivity of 20mIU are more sensitive than the ones with a sensitivity of 50 mIU. To detect a pregnancy at the early stages, you need a test with a sensitivity of 20-25 mIU.

If you use a home pregnancy test with this sensitivity, you can start testing about eight days after conception. Remember that conception could happen a few days after you had intercourse. This means that intercourse and conception don’t necessarily happen on the same date.

Official information

According to the claims of the home pregnancy kit manufacturers, the accuracy of the tests is of 97%. When women get a false result it is most probably because they didn’t follow the instructions of the manufacturer carefully.  In the same time there are different factors that can influence the results.

Instructions

In order to be using the most accurate pregnancy test there are some instructions that you should follow. It is believed that it is best to use the first urine in the morning to perform the test. If you want to have the test in the morning you shouldn’t drink a lot of water before going to sleep so that your urine won’t be diluted.

One of the most important things to remember about the accuracy of home pregnancy kits is to read carefully the instructions and make sure that you follow them. No matter what kind of test you are using, it should be precise.

When it comes to the pregnancy kits’ accuracy, make sure that the urine doesn’t touch the area where you read the results. If you use test strips be careful not to dip the strip in urine below the marker. In case of the midstream tests the window should be facing away from the urine stream.

It is likely that you won’t appreciate the accuracy of the home pregnancy tests because of the evaporation lines. These can be avoided if you read the results in the given time frame and not later because you could see a false result.

In case you are asking are pregnancy tests accurate, the answer is yes, but you have to make sure that you use them as they were meant to be used.