Mc Mirella announced that she is pregnant with her first child with singer Dynho Alves. The post published on Instagram last Thursday (11) surpassed 1 million likes and 51,000 comments.
In a video, Mirella said that she had noticed some changes in her body in recent days and decided to take a pregnancy test, one of those sold in pharmacies in the same publication the couple advertised for a pharmaceutical company.
Check out the following facts about how a pharmacy test works.
The “secret” behind the pregnancy test
1. Hormones reveal everything
The tests use chemical reactions to detect the presence of the hormone hCG in a woman’s urine. He is the one who indicates whether there is a pregnancy or not.
Production of this hormone begins in the cells of the developing fetus from the first week of pregnancy.
2. The “way” of urine
There is a “trail” in part of the test stick that absorbs the urine.
There are two strips in this part: a control strip with a dye that is activated at that moment. This is proof that the test is valid.
The dye on the second strip is only activated when the hormone hCG is present. The chemical reaction releases the color in the ribbon (usually pink or blue).
3. Contact with antibodies
When detecting pregnancy, the test takes into account two types of antibodies:
A monoclonal protein (proteins produced in the body that support the immune system).
A polyclonal antibody (antibodies derived from different B lymphocytes) that reacts with hCG, if present.
4. The results
If only the control line appears, the person is not pregnant.
If only the “positive” line appears, the test was not carried out correctly.
If two lines appear, the test is positive.
Doctors always advise going to a specialized laboratory to confirm pregnancy with a blood test.
That was not always so
Pregnancy tests in pharmacies are relatively new, only appearing after the 1960s. It used to be common to use frogs and toads to determine pregnancy. It worked like this:
About a week after conception, the woman’s body starts to show changes due to the production of hCG.
When a pregnancy was suspected, these female frogs and toads were injected with a urine sample in the back.
That’s because women relied on a slightly different property of hCG: its ability to induce ovulation in amphibians very quickly.
After a period of eight to twelve hours, the answer came: if the amphibian had laid eggs, the pregnancy was confirmed in humans; otherwise it was discarded.