New At-Home Pregnancy Test Tells You How Long You’ve Been Knocked Up For
Ladies (and gentlemen), mark your ovulation calendars accordingly. September 1st will usher in a whole new era in at-home pregnancy testing, right up there with those gender predictor ones. Such is when we can look forward to purchasing the first ever at-home pregnancy test that tells you how far along you are.
TIME magazine reports that the Clearblue Advanced Pregnancy Test with Weeks Estimator has two strips as opposed to one:
Both strips measure a hormone women produce when they are pregnant, called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), that appears after fertilization. hCG levels increase significantly in a woman’s urine during the early weeks of pregnancy, and start to decline 11 weeks into the pregnancy. Like standard pregnancy tests, the new one measures hCG levels. But the second hCG detection strip uses the hormone to estimate the length of the pregnancy based on time since ovulation. If a woman is indeed pregnant, the test will read: ”Pregnant,” as well as list either: 1-2, 2-3 or 3+ to indicate by how many weeks.
ISN”T THAT SO SCIFI?! Can it also tell us what our pregnancy cravings will be? How crappy our morning sickness will be (on a scale of 1-10)? Maybe we can expect these features in the Clearblue ADVANCED Advanced Pregnancy Test.
According to Clearblue, the test is 99 percent accurate when it comes to “detecting pregnancy from the day of a woman’s expected period,” and 93 percent accurate in discerning the number weeks you are pregnant. Obviously, as is always the case with at-home pregnancy tests, you should have all this confirmed by a doctor. Don’t just rely on the SCIFI pregnancy device.
This particular Clearblue test has reportedly already been enjoyed by European women since 2008. The FDA approved the test for the American market late last year.
Apparently, Clearblue is just looking to keep with the times in debuting this particular test:
”Through our consumer research, we found consumers were really wanting more information at the beginning of pregnancy. In fact, 78% of women in our research study feel that knowing how far along you are at the beginning of pregnancy is very important,” says Ryan Daly, the Marketing Director at Procter & Gamble, which makes the test. ”We’re excited to bring this to the U.S. because there is nothing else like it. Consumers have been looking for more information and answers in the pregnancy test category and there hasn’t been any innovation since the digital pregnancy test was launched.”
Until now!
(photo: Clearblue)
