When to take a home pregnancy test

For most of my cycles, I’ve “cheated” and taken home pregnancy tests.  They’ve always been accurate.

The first question is whether it matters—the fact that you have HCG is less important than what the number is and whether it’s doubling.  (Which is why fertility clinics want clients to wait for the blood tests.)  But assuming you just want to know something as early as possible, well, you can use home pregnancy tests.  

As I’ve written in the past, HCG rises during the pregnancy, but people can definitely have different measurements and still have successful pregnancies:

http://3yearwait.blogspot.com/2015/11/beta-hcg-measurements-part-ii.html

An embryo that implants later would be expected to have lower HCG than one that implanted earlier, and twins have higher HCG than singletons.  Also, not all pregnancy tests are created equally.  (I like the Clearblue Easy Earliest Result Pregnancy Test and First Response Early Result Pregnancy Test, both of which allegedly measure at 25 mIU/ml.)

http://3yearwait.blogspot.com/2015/10/to-pee-on-hpt-or-not-to-pee-that-is.html

I found an interesting article on the question of when to test…. 

http://www.ivfconnections.com/forums/content.php/673-The-IVF-Two-Week-Wait-%282WW%29-If-and-When-to-Do-a-Home-Pregnancy-Test

So here are my thoughts on HPT testing:

Cycle day	Event / Thoughts on HPT
12	HCG trigger (for fresh cycle)
13
14	Retrieval (“ovulation”)
15 (1dpo)
16 (2dpo)
17 (3dpo)	3-day transfer
18 (4dpo)
19 (5dpo)	5-day transfer (embryo could start to implant today)
20 (1dp5dt)      (6dpo)	(embryo could implant today)
21 (2dp5dt)      (7dpo)	(embryo could implant today)
22 (3dp5dt)      (8dpo)	Some women allegedly get a positive HPT on this day (early implantation, twins?)
23 (4dp5dt)      (9dpo)	The earliest high quality home pregnancy tests claim to start to be accurate (“5 days before missed period”)
24 (5dp5dt)      (10dpo)
25 (6dp5dt)     (11dpo)	Generally the first day I would feel comfortable testing to get a reliable result
26 (7dp5dt)      (12dpo)	Would expect a sensitive HPT to work for most viable pregnancies
27 (8dp5dt)      (13dpo)
28 (9dp5dt)      (14dpo)	Official blood test at doc’s office (“missed period”)

I guess this would be a good time to mention that I took a home pregnancy test this morning and it was negative.