How Accurate Are Home Pregnancy Tests?

When a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus, the placenta starts secreting a hormone, hCG.  This is evident in both the blood and the urine of the mother.  Most pregnancy tests today are able to detect the presence of this hormone in the earliest days, and accurately determine that the woman is pregnant.Home pregnancy tests are simple, quick and easy, with no guess work.   The kit contains a pregnancy strip.  It works by applying the strip to some of your urine.  If the strip changes colour, this indicates the presence of hCG, and you know you are pregnant.If you choose the Equate pregnancy test you will find that there are three great advantages to this.  Firstly you will pay a lot less for these than for many others in the same sophisticated test bracket.  Secondly you will be able to test accurately on the first day that your period is late.  In the third place it is absolutely simple to use and you should have the result within 60 seconds!Even just a decade or two back, if you wanted a home pregnancy test, you had to mix chemicals to ascertain whether you were pregnant.  Shortly before that women had to take a urine sample  to their physicians who would do the test for them.  No home test kits were invented yet.Back in the 1960s, laboratories used a system of anti-hCG anti-bodies to detect reactions to determine pregnancy, but this was rather hit and miss.  Other factors could influence these antibodies, so you could never be sure in the early stages of pregnancy.Prior to that, laboratory animals had to pay with their lives to enable women to find out whether or not they were pregnant.  Young sexually immature rabbits, rats and frogs were injected with female human samples.  If these samples from the woman contained hCG, this would cause ovulation in the animal.  This could only be determined by means of a post mortem on the animal.Surprisingly, from our earliest history, people realised that a woman’s urine held the key to whether she was pregnant or not.  In ancient Egypt a woman’s urine was applied to various different grains, and depending on which type of grains germinated, this determined whether she was pregnant, and even what sex her child would be!During the middle ages, a woman’s urine was ‘read’ in much the same way as tea leaves were later read.  A great deal of imagination was needed.    Still later, individual physicians ‘read’ urine somewhat differently.  Detecting pregnancy still called for a lot of guess work, but some doctors seemed to notice differences in the appearance of the urine of pregnant and non-pregnant women.The most obvious early sign of pregnancy in a woman still remains the cessation of her monthly menstruation.Although it can happen that a pregnant woman can have early pregnancy bleeding, it is not possible to have a proper period while pregnant.  A normal menstruation involves the coming away of the lining of the uterus.  If a proper period were to happen while she was pregnant, it would indicate a miscarriage.Early pregnancy bleeding can vary in amounts from slight spotting to heavier amount of blood, but it does not usually coincide with the normal time of the menstrual cycle.  Although probably harmless, it is always safer to consult your doctor if this happens to you.When you are 40 weeks pregnant, your baby’s foetal age is 38 weeks.   How many weeks in a pregnancy is calculated to include the first two weeks when you go through the fertile period and it is only two weeks later that your baby is seated in the womb and actually starts to develop.  So at 40 weeks you can expect to go into labour at any moment.