Advice on When to Take Pregnancy Test After Ovulation
Thanks to the efforts of Georgeanna Jones, a medical researcher at The Johns Hopkins University, more of today’s young women are now asking their doctors when to take pregnancy test after ovulation. When Dr. Jones was in medical school, few researchers focused on the reasons why a couple might encounter problems with starting a family. Medical doctors had little advice for women who could not become pregnant. Fortunately, Dr. Jones did not follow the inclinations of the other researchers. Her findings provided medicine with important information on how conception could be detected. Her findings have allowed women to know exactly when to take pregnancy test after ovulation.
A home pregnancy test can detect the presence of human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG) in a woman’s urine. That level goes up slightly every day once a child has been conceived. It reaches a detectable level about 7 to 8 days beyond the day when the woman last ovulated. Still, if a woman does not know the exact pattern of her menstrual cycle, she may have these questions in the back of her mind: How and when to take pregnancy test after ovulation.
If a woman has had a very regular menstrual cycle, she could safely assume that she would ovulate between 12 to 16 days after the start of her last period. She could then plan to take a home pregnancy test during that time span. She might well choose to take the test on more than one of those 4 days. She would use a calendar in order to determine when to take her pregnancy test.
A woman who does not have a regular menstrual cycle can still count on more than one way to remove her hesitation concerning when to take pregnancy test after ovulation. She might, for example want to observe her cervical mucus. During the course of the menstrual cycle, that mucus grows and undergoes changes in texture. If a woman sees that her cervical mucus is clear, slippery and stretchy, then she knows that her cycle has reached the stage at which she is most fertile.
If a woman does not want to rely on the observation of her cervical mucus, she does not need to remain “in the dark” concerning how and when to take pregnancy test after ovulation. In order to decide on the best time for such a test, a woman could choose to take her basal temperature. That would require her to record her temperature every morning, as soon as she was awake. The woman would then study that charted temperature to find the point where there was an increase of 0.5 to 1.6 degrees. That increase would point to the time of ovulation.
Once a woman has discovered when to take pregnancy test after ovulation, she then must choose how she is going to take that test. There are many different home pregnancy kits on the market. A woman should realize that not every kit detects the woman’s hCG level as it reaches the same concentration. A few kits can detect a level as low as 20mIU/ml. Some do not detect a level smaller than 50mIU/ml. Those kits that can detect a low level of hCG are the ones that a woman would want to use soon after ovulation.
So while a woman waits for her ovulation to occur, she should study the information on the different pregnancy test kits, and find the one that she can use right after ovulation.