It's best to wait about a week after you miss your period to take a home pregnancy test. By that time, most newly pregnant women have enough human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in their urine for the tests to detect it.
Many home pregnancy tests claim to be "greater than 99 percent accurate" and imply that you can use them as early as the day you miss your period, but a study published in 2004 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology has shown that this can be misleading.
Researchers at the University of New Mexico evaluated 18 tests and found that only one was consistently sensitive enough to detect the levels of hCG that most pregnant women were likely to have on the first day of their missed period. Most of the other tests were able to pick up about 16 percent of pregnancies at that point.
Fitness
