Overview
If you have been trying to conceive and you have recently missed your periods, you are among 80% of the women who may ask a question to themselves- Am I pregnant? Along with your skipped menstrual cycle, you may feel other symptoms of pregnancy like sore breasts, nausea, fatigue, frequent urination, cramps, etc.
These symptoms may show that you are pregnant and you will be on cloud nine when it is confirmed. Why not? Pregnancy is wonderful news for everyone in your family. But how do you confirm your pregnancy the right way?
There are a lot of patients who ask us two major questions, how fast can we detect pregnancy, and what is the best way of doing it? So, today in this blog we will talk about three correct methods useful to confirm pregnancy.
These three pregnancy confirmation methods include the usage of a home pregnancy kit, detecting it by pregnancy hormone in the blood, and through ultrasound.
It is important to note down that we can detect pregnancy only after two weeks of conception. To understand this, let’s understand the concept of conception. As soon as an embryo gets stick to the uterus, the level of a hormone called Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG), starts developing.
This HCG hormone rises and gets mixed in the blood and the urine. All pregnancy tests depend on this pregnancy hormone to detect a pregnancy.
Now, in the initial days when you miss your periods and experience some above symptoms, you might think you are pregnant. So like almost all women, you do a pregnancy confirmation test by using a pregnancy kit.
What are the three methods of confirming pregnancy in the right way?
The first way of confirming pregnancy at home is by using a Pregnancy Test Kit. These kits are easily available at nearby pharmacies. It is important to use the first-morning sample of urine, which is the urine sample collected while urinating for the first time in the morning. The morning sample of this urine has a high concentration of pregnancy hormone by which it increases the accuracy of the test.
Don’t worry, if you forget to do the test in the morning, you can do it anytime in the day. There’s only one problem in doing the same thing is that when you do a pregnancy test during the day, it can show a false or negative result. This happens because the pregnancy hormone gets diluted in the urine sample collected for the test. To understand how this pregnancy kit works, watch our full video at:
Now talking about interpreting a pregnancy test kit, if both the lines are dark pink on the pregnancy kit, woohoo, congratulations, you are pregnant. There are other possibilities like if your C line is positive and the T line is negative, then it interprets that test as negative and you are not pregnant. The third possibility of a pregnancy kit is the invalid test in which either no line is present or when the C line is absent, but the T line is present. Here, there is a problem with the test kit and you need to repeat the test again.
The fourth possibility of this kit is the faint positive test in which the C line is dark pink but the T line is light pink. This shows that either the pregnancy is at a very initial stage or it is a biochemical pregnancy.
The second method of confirming pregnancy is with the help of a blood test. After you meet your doctor, he will ask you to do a blood test to confirm pregnancy. This blood test also detects and confirms pregnancy with the same pregnancy hormone called beta HCG. The report of this blood test comes in the form of numbers where, if the number is above five, it shows you are pregnant. In most of the pregnancies, this number should be above 100.
One speciality of this hormone is that it gets doubled in 48 hours and if this doesn’t happen, it shows an unhealthy pregnancy or miscarriage. In this condition, consult a doctor as we consider it an emergency.
Now, the third way of confirming a pregnancy is by ultrasound. Ultrasound can confirm pregnancy when it is around five weeks mature or the level of HCG hormone is around 1500 and above. As early as five weeks, we can see the pregnancy in the form of a small dot in the uterus and can confirm it. Around six to seven weeks of pregnancy we can see and hear the heartbeat of the baby by ultrasound. This is what the beauty of ultrasound is.
Talking about the ultrasound, I remember a myth that is that the ultrasound is not safe. This is not at all true. There are no rays in ultrasound, and that’s why it is safe for pregnancy. Along with this, as mentioned at the start of this blog, you may experience some common symptoms of pregnancy like nausea, fatigue, morning sickness, etc. You may feel that your breasts have become heavy and sore.
Conclusion
If you are pregnant, congratulations. Now you are never alone. Your little bundle of joy is always with you. And even if you are not pregnant, don’t worry. We hope you hear good news soon.