Most Hospital Pregnancy Tests Found to Be Unreliable After First Few Weeks of Pregnancy

Though the 11 most popular hospital urine pregnancy tests perform well in the first month after conception, a new study published in Clinical Chemistry, the journal of AACC, reveals the alarming statistic that nine of these tests become significantly more likely to produce false-negative results after the 5th to 7th week of pregnancy. When a human egg is fertilized, it begins producing the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which can be detected in either urine or blood. This is what healthcare providers test for to determine if a woman is pregnant. Around the 5th to 7th week of gestation, however, urine concentrations of an hCG variant known as the hCG beta core fragment rise dramatically, interfering with hCG detection and causing false-negative test results

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Most Hospital Pregnancy Tests Found to Be Unreliable After First Few Weeks of Pregnancy

Source: AACC Newswice