In a doctor’s office, blood tests are performed. Pregnancy tests are more sensitive than urine tests at detecting hCG. Six to eight days after ovulation, blood testing can reveal if you’re pregnant. As early as 11–14 days after ovulation, your doctor can perform a blood test to see if you’re pregnant. The doctor uses a needle to draw blood from a vein in your arm to perform a blood pregnancy test. This blood will be sent to a laboratory for examination. Most blood pregnancy tests require at least a few days for results. In the event that you believe you are pregnant, you don’t want to simply assume: you want to know for sure. A pregnancy test purchased at a pharmacy isn’t always accurate, especially if you don’t know how to use it or interpret the results. A professional, medical-grade pregnancy test should be performed by a doctor. Here is everything you need to know on finding a blood pregnancy test clinics.
As it turns out, doctors’ offices and some labs offer free blood tests for expecting mothers. Urine pregnancy tests are often the sole option offered by most women’s health clinics, such as Planned Parenthood. The fact that a health center or local Planned Parenthood can confirm a pregnancy does not mean that they will do so via a blood test. Before scheduling an appointment, it’s a good idea to explore your options and the services available at each clinic or doctor’s office.
A urine pregnancy test and a blood pregnancy test are not interchangeable, so how can you tell the difference? In a nutshell, human chorionic gonadotropin. HCG, or human growth hormone, is the hormone of pregnancy, according to the American Pregnancy Association (APA). After the embryo adheres to the uterine lining, the placenta produces this hormone and it builds up quickly in your body in the first few days of pregnancy.”
There are several advantages to using a blood pregnancy test over a urine pregnancy test. As low as 5 units of human chorionic gonadotropin can be detected in an early pregnancy blood test, despite the fact that home pregnancy tests typically pick up on a concentration of roughly 50 units of hCG.
However, a blood test is not always necessary, and even if I had wanted one, it would have been a waste of my time. Parents even tell women who are trying to conceive that “early pregnancy tests aren’t normally necessary, but they can make a difference for women at higher risk for miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy,” If you have a medical condition that puts you at risk for either of these things, you should find out you’re pregnant as soon as possible so you can see your doctor and get the treatment you need.
When you have a pregnancy blood test, what are you looking for? According to Parents, the two blood tests were spaced roughly 48 hours apart. “Pregnancy hormone (hCG) levels should double every 48 hours or so throughout the first trimester. The doctor can check for a miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy based on the decrease in hCG levels, or confirm that your pregnancy is growing normally.”
APA guidelines state that a urine pregnancy test can detect pregnancies two weeks after conception, whereas blood pregnancy tests can detect pregnancies in the first seven to 12 days of pregnancy, respectively. In other words, if you opt for a blood test, you’ll know if you’re pregnant almost a week earlier than if you go for a urine test. While a urine pregnancy test is free, a blood pregnancy test is more expensive and takes longer to return results than the two minutes that a urine pregnancy test takes to sit in your bathroom and show pink lines.
An eight-week checkup with your doctor will be scheduled if your urine pregnancy test indicates a positive result, which is eight weeks following the start of your last menstrual cycle. During this time, an ultrasound should be able to pinpoint the pregnancy. To determine whether or not you’re pregnant, a blood pregnancy test will most likely be ordered if your doctor isn’t successful in finding the pregnancy by ultrasound.
You must, like with most things in life, strictly adhere to the directions provided on the urine pregnancy test kit. If you wait too long after peeing on the pregnancy test, the results will be void. You should always take both of the tests included in a package in order to be sure that the result is correct. And if your tests are evenly divided between pregnant and not pregnant, make an appointment with your doctor and have a blood test performed to resolve the impasse!v