How Long Is Urine Good For Pregnancy Tests?
If you don’t know how a home pregnancy test works, it might help to learn before you take one of your own. A home pregnancy test is designed to detect the pregnancy hormone in your urine. This hormone is called hCG. It begins to appear after you ovulate and your egg is fertilized by sperm and implants into your uterus. This is not right away, however. It takes as little as a few days and as much as a week or so before your fertilized egg makes its way through the fallopian tubes and into your uterus. Once it gets there it begins to implant on the uterine wall. Once it implants, your body begins to produce hCG. However, the levels of hCG apparent in your urine are very small in the beginning. While the level doubles to triples every 48 to 72 hours, each woman’s body is different and the rate at which your levels increase is unknown.
Once you have enough hCG in your urine to detect with a home pregnancy test, it’s safe to test. You will need to do one of two things; you can hold your pregnancy test in your stream of urine as you use the restroom, or you can save your urine in a disposable cup and dip the absorbent tip into the urine. Most women choose to do the cup. It’s far easier and more accurately done. Holding the absorbent tip of the test in your urine stream is fine, but some women find it a little difficult to ensure it’s being hit with urine for the amount of time recommended on the test instructions.
If you choose to urinate in a disposable cup, you might want to know how long your urine is good to use on a pregnancy test. Since it’s recommended that you use your first urine of the morning, you might need to save it if you don’t have a pregnancy test on hand and need to pick one up. Additionally, you might get a result on a test you already have and want to confirm it with another test. This might prompt you to keep your urine. However, you’ll need to know how long it’s good. Typically, your urine is fine to keep for a few hours or more. You probably don’t want to keep it longer than a few hours for sanitary purposes, but if you need to keep it all day until you get home, it’s still going to be good when you return.
Using 24 Hour Old Urine To Test For Pregnancy
If you keep your urine for 24 hours after urinating in a cup, you will still receive an accurate result. However, you might want to consider simply waiting until the following morning to use the first urine of that day with which to test. This isn’t because the urine you saved for 24 hours is no longer good, it’s just more sanitary to dispose of urine as quickly as possible. If you do decide to keep your urine for 24 hours or more, please consider keeping it in a sealed cup and disposing of that cup as soon as you are finished with your urine.
It is important to keep in mind that urine saved for 24 hours is not as good as fresh urine. This could impact the results of your pregnancy test, but it is not a proven fact. It’s merely speculation that urine saved for a solid day is not as good to use in a home pregnancy test as urine that’s fresh or only a few hours old. To be on the safe side, you might not want to use urine that’s been saved for 24 hours. However, it’s entirely up to you whether or not you will do this.
Can Blood Affect A Urine Pregnancy Test?
Perhaps you’d like to take a home pregnancy test but you’ve noticed that there is some blood in your urine. While the blood in your urine shouldn’t directly affect your pregnancy test, it could have a secondary affect on your test. This blood could be implantation bleeding. Implantation bleeding happens after your egg implants itself onto your uterine wall. It might happen the same day or a few days later. How does this affect your pregnancy test? If you’re bleeding is implantation bleeding, you might not have a high enough level of hCG in your urine to detect pregnancy. Your implantation might have been too recent and your body hasn’t had enough time to increase your hormone levels to indicate pregnancy. This is how implantation bleeding affects the results of a pregnancy test. It’s best to wait a few days closer to the beginning of your period to test.
The second way that bleeding could affect your pregnancy test is that it could be your period arriving and you will not receive a positive result. It could also be something else. Many women experience a very early miscarriage without ever realizing it. This happens when your pregnancy fails before it really even begins. You might notice that you are bleeding a little a few days before your period is scheduled to arrive. This could be the result of a very early miscarriage causing your period to arrive earlier than scheduled.
Blood as a whole does not affect your pregnancy test. However, if you take a home pregnancy test while bleeding and you receive a positive result, you will need to call your doctor immediately. There is never a good time to bleed during pregnancy, which means you want to be on the safe side. Your doctor can do some tests and even perform an ultrasound to figure out whether or not you are pregnant and what is causing your bleeding. Anytime you bleed while pregnant, call your doctor to receive prompt medical care for yourself and your potential baby