Pregnancy
Pregnancy Tests
There are basically three types of pregnancy tests, namely, the home pregnancy test, the in-office urine test, and the blood test. Each comes with its own pluses and minuses.
The home pregnancy test is now much more accurate than it was in the past and it is much simpler to use. Like the urine test which is performed either in a physician's office or in a lab, the home pregnancy test diagnoses pregnancy on the basis of the presence of a particular hormone in the urine. Some tests can detect pregnancy as early as the first day of a missed menstrual period, that is, about fourteen days after conception. It takes as little as five minutes to perform this test and the urine sample can be collected at any time of the day. If done correctly, the home pregnancy test is now almost as accurate as a urine test performed in the doctor’s office or in a laboratory. A positive result is more likely to be correct than a negative one. Home testing offers the advantage of privacy and almost immediate results. And because they detect pregnancy very early on, they can provide you with the opportunity to start taking good care of yourself within days of conception. However, they can be quite expensive and because you are less likely to feel confident of the results, you are more likely to want to retest, thereby increasing your cost even more.
The laboratory or in-office urine test can also detect the presence of a signal pregnancy hormone very early on (seven to ten days after conception) and with a very high degree of accuracy. Unlike the home test, it is not performed by you but by a professional who is more likely to perform it correctly than you are. Although urine tests are less expensive than blood tests, they are not used as often only because they do not provide as much information as a blood tests do.
The more sophisticated serum, or blood, pregnancy test can detect pregnancy with almost one hundred percent accuracy as early as one week after conception. Moreover, it can also help to date a pregnancy by measuring the exact amount of pregnancy hormone in the blood. As with the other tests, though, false negatives are still possible. Occasionally, therefore, a practitioner might order both a urine and a blood test to be extra sure of the diagnosis of a pregnancy test.