What causes a spike in hCG to create a false positive pregnancy test?
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I’m not looking for the bullshit I keep seeing about old pregnancy tests or we don’t read them right. I don’t care about the test, I want to know what could make this hormone rise to create a false positive test? Possible medications, lifestyle, lack of eating, stress, infections, and anything like that?
Only if you are taking medication related to getting pregnant, that contains the hormone HCG. Nothing else will give you a false positive.
What can happen is you are pregnant when you take the test, they you lose the baby early on, so the next test is negative, this is a chemical pregnancy, or an early miscarriage.
The ways to get a false positive I know of are
1. Certain fertility medications actually contain hCG, as a part of helping your body to become a suitable enviroment for implantation, perhaps if your body has trouble making the chemical itself. So if you’re taking fertility medications that contain it you will show positive whether you are or not. I’m uncertain as to whether any non-fertility related drugs contain it, I doubt it, but it’s worth looking at the ingredients list anyway.
2. The most common occurance is not actually a false positive. Many women have miscarriages they don’t even know about, that simply pass as if they were your next period. If you miscarry around 4 or 5 weeks from your last ovulation, a not uncommon occurance as the baby often isnt viable for an assortment of reasons, you may find yourself with a positive hCG test and a slightly abnormal but not worrying period a day or two later which is actually a miscarriage. This is called a ‘chemical pregnancy’.
3. Technicly the same as 2 but bears mentioning on it’s own. Pregnancy tests are not uniform, if a box says it will detect the hormone when it reaches 25mIU/mL, then it will detect at that level, but some tests may detect earlier and even by the same brand. In a box of three tests, one might detect at 23, one at 20 and one at 15. Researchers found that some tests, on occasion, were able to detect levels as low as 4.5mIU/mL This would pick up a very early miscarriage.
4. If you have actually hit menopause without realising it (missing periods through the pill or never getting your period back after your last pregnancy for example) your levels of hCG actually do go up a fair bit, as far as 12 mIU/mL. Usually this is too small for a pregnancy test to see, but as mentioned in 3, some are more sensitive than others, and if you had a sensitive one it might pick it up.
5. Finally, in some rare cases, certain cancers such as bladder cancer, or ovarian cysts, have been known to produce something similar to hCG, similar enough that it is picked up by the test and can become a false positive, but it is unusual at best.
And of course there is the usual things about not leaving it more than 10 minutes, old tests causing evaporation lines, and imagined lines.
The body contains a very small amount of hCG hormone when not pregnant, something like 1mIU/mL, undetectable on a pregnancy test, and dosen’t create excess amounts of the hormone hCG for any other reason. The hormone is basically there because a baby is a foreign body inside of you, like a tumour or someone elses organs in a transplant. Your body’s instant reaction is to reject it, get rid of it. The purpose of hCG is similar to the purpose of the drugs transplant patients take to stop rejection, except much more sophisticated and it only effects one ‘object’, the foetus. It stops rejection from happening. If the baby is unlikely to survive, or has trouble in the first weeks of development, the level of hCG drops, which is often used as an early indicator of miscarriage by doctors. If the baby passes away, the hCG disapears altogether, and the body rids itself of the foreign matter like any other.
It’s actually really cool to find out how everything comes together during pregnancy, and the way the body works and provides. Your physical body is trying to get rid of this, but it can’t because another part of your body is stopping it. Some people believe this could be the cause of morning sickness, this ‘war’ between whether baby stays or goes, just as we may get a fever, infection, vomiting, or some other symptom if something that shouldnt be inside us is inside us.
the only thing that will result in a spike in hcg levels is pregnancy it self, Even if it is a very recent prev pregnancy the hormones will be picked up on a test, my friend had a miscarraige so was not pregnant and did 6 tests and all 6 were positive yet she had had scans etc and there was no pregnancy, however she had only shortley before this lost the baby,
But i can guarentee you that if the test is saying you are pregnant then you are pregnant unless you have recently been pregnant and for some reason you are not…
Personally i would get yourself booked in to see your dr and discuss your hcg levels with them…
These levels like i said will only rise due to the presence of a pregnancy or recent pregnancy
The only possible thing that could give a false positive would be fertility drugs that contained the actual hormone itself,if nothing is there then there is nothing to detect and no other drugs,diet,stress or illnesses or anything else will cause it.
If you were taking the kind of fertility drugs that contain hcg then the doctor would advise you that it may give a false positive on a test,the only other time a woman may get a positive test and not actually be pregnant is if she has recently had a miscarriage and the hormone has not completely left her body.