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Am I or Not?

At-home Tests Are Easy
and Reliable

By Kelly Burgess

Mary Krenn* of Council Bluffs, Iowa, was still nursing her 6-month-old daughter, and her periods hadn't returned. She thought it might be stress from having a new baby and a 3-year-old, but her regular family physician thought it was somehow related to kidney stones, so he scheduled a CT scan of her kidneys. Prior to the CT scan, the technician at the hospital told her to take a home pregnancy test the day of the scan as a routine measure. He explained that because the scan involves quite a bit of radiation, they like verification that a patient is not pregnant.

Krenn took the test as instructed and was puzzled to find two lines on the test stick. She literally turned it over and over, trying to figure out how it could be reading positive. Certain that she wasn't pregnant, she cancelled her CT scan and called her obstetrician, who asked her to come right over.

The nurse, who still remembered Krenn from her recent pregnancy, asked her why she was in that day. Worriedly, Krenn explained the situation and said she needed to know "what else could make a home pregnancy test turn up positive?" After the nurse was done laughing, she said, "Pretty much nothing but pregnancy." They did another test, and, sure enough, Krenn was pregnant again. She and her husband now have three beautiful children, but the last one was quite a shock.

When the nurse laughed at Krenn, it was because she knew that pregnancy tests are among the most reliable home tests on earth. In fact, they're often more reliable than the same types of urine tests taken at the doctor's office. Dr. Callie Holmgren, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based OB/GYN, says this is because home pregnancy tests are usually done first thing in the morning, when the urine is very concentrated. When done later in the day at the doctor's office, the urine may be quite a bit weaker.

All pregnancy tests look for a special hormone in the urine or blood that is only present when a woman is pregnant. This hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), is also called the pregnancy hormone. In sufficient quantities, the presence of the hormone is detected by the pregnancy test. Some tests use strips that you hold in a stream of urine, and some actually have you collect urine in one receptacle and then dip a separate component. Regardless of how it's done, they all operate on the same principle.

Want to see more?

• Answers to Your Pregnancy Test Questions
• Are You or Aren't You? The Most Common Signs of Pregnancy
• Home Pregnancy Test Sensitivity Comparison Table
• Talk about it!