Using a pregnancy test, can you tell if you have a stillbirth?

The article is professionally consulted by Specialist Doctor Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology - Vinmec Hai Phong International General Hospital.

In addition to learning about the stillbirth problem, whether the test strip shows up to 2 lines, women need to learn some signs of stillbirth while in the mother's womb in order to detect early and take appropriate measures to handle it. safe. A pregnancy test only answers yes or no pregnancy, and it takes at least two weeks after a miscarriage for a pregnancy test to be negative.

Stillbirth is a condition in which a fertilized egg has implanted in the uterus, but it cannot develop. Stillbirth is easy to occur in the first month of pregnancy and cannot be ruled out in the following months.

There are many causes of stillbirth from both the mother and the fetus:
During pregnancy, the mother may suffer from chronic diseases such as kidney inflammation, liver failure, anemia, tuberculosis, disease Heart disease, high blood pressure or endocrine diseases such as Graves' disease, hypothyroidism, diabetes,... In addition, pregnancy toxicity is an easy cause of stillbirth if the mother is sick. For many days, poor eating and sleeping conditions make the fetus malnourished and stillborn. In addition, there are other diseases in the mother such as parasitic infection such as malaria, bacterial infection (syphilis), viral infection (hepatitis, mumps, influenza...) or the mother has a malformed uterus, death Underdeveloped supply causes the fetus to be undernourished. In particular, mothers over 40 years of age pregnant, the rate of stillbirth is many times higher than those of mothers under 40 years old. Besides, inadequate nutrition, hard labor... are also the causes leading to stillbirth.

When the fetus is stillborn, the test strip still shows two lines because the fetus is still in the mother's womb, the amount of hormones produced during pregnancy is below normal, so the test still gives two lines.
Many questions arise about stillbirth, does the test stick up 2 lines? In fact, a pregnancy test only answers yes or no pregnancy, and it takes at least two weeks after a miscarriage (meaning all of the pregnancy tissue has been expelled from the uterus) for a pregnancy test to be negative.
Using pregnancy test strips only works to detect if a woman is pregnant. As for the case of stillbirth, the use of test strips cannot diagnose.
To assess whether the fetus continues to develop or not can be based on the amount of β hCG in the blood, through two consecutive tests 48 hours apart, the second result is twice as high as the first, that the fetus is developing.
During stillbirth, the hCG hormone levels in the body have not disappeared and only after about 2-3 weeks, they gradually decrease and disappear.
In order to have a healthy pregnancy and safe childbirth, the mother before becoming pregnant needs to have complete vaccinations as well as regular health check-ups to ensure her body is ready to enter the 9-month pregnancy journey. 10 days.
Vinmec International General Hospital offers a Package Maternity Care Program for pregnant women right from the first months of pregnancy with a full range of antenatal care visits, periodical 3D and 4D ultrasounds and routine tests to ensure that the mother is healthy and the fetus is developing comprehensively. Pregnant women will be consulted and checked for health under the close supervision of experienced and specialized obstetricians, helping mothers gain more knowledge to protect their health during pregnancy as well as minimize complications affecting mother and child.