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Understanding Early Pregnancy Concerns: Spotting & Blood Test Results


Question
brenda
        my lmp was janurary 10th..i've had a little spotting. i had thrid blood test. the first on feb. 19th came back postive then the second and thrid were done is week..the doctor said they came back that i'm not pregnant and that the numbers wre to little to have had a miscarriage...any clues as to what could cause this.
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The text above is a follow-up to ...

-----Question-----
two weeks ago i went for blood test to see if i was pregnant it come back postive. now they are coming back that i am not pregnant..how is this possible?
-----Answer-----
Dear Jennifer,

It's difficult to answer this without more information , such as your LMP date. Your question title is "Quad Test". The Quad Test is actually a screening done between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy that is a maternal blood screening test that looks for four specific substances: AFP, hCG, Estriol, and Inhibin-A, which can indicate a pregnancy at risk of carrying a baby with a genetic disorder.

If you were at your 16th-18th week of pregnancy, there surely would have been no discrepancy in the positive nature of a pregnancy test.

So - as I said, without knowing your LMP date, it really is difficult to know why this discrepancy may have happened. False positive pregnancy tests are rare and typically only occur when the woman has had fertility therapy and had an hCG shot. At times, if a home pregnancy test is allowed to sit for too long it is considered invalid and occasionally it can read positive when no pregnancy actually exists. However, if you had the test done at the office, this scenario is unlikely.

Regardless, you should discuss this further with your doctor, especially if you have missed more than 2-3 periods and have not yet had any bleeding. A cause for the absence of periods will need to be determined if it is not pregnancy.

I hope I helped a bit. I wish you well.

Brenda  

Answer
Dear Jennifer,

Well, if your LMP was 1/10, the the 1st test on 2/19 would have been at just 5 weeks. At 5 weeks, a normal range for hCG is 18 - 7,340 mIU/ml. In order for a pregnancy test to come back positive, it would have only had to have been 25 mIU/ml. Now - why you would have even come back that high and not been pregnant, I don't know unless there was an error in the testing OR you had a very early miscarriage almost immediately following that 1st test.

I'm sure it is frustrating not to have a more definitive answer from someone, but other than the reasons for a false positive I gave you previously, I really can't explain why this occurred for you. Your doctor may have more insight that I am not aware of.

I do wish you well. Keep trying. Let yourself have 1-2 regular periods to get your hormones stabilized, but do keep trying.

Brenda