hCG Levels: What Do They Tell Us, and Why Should We Care

If you are doing infertility treatments, chances are your doctor will have you test your human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone levels about 12 days after your procedure to determine if you are pregnant. hCG can be detected in one’s urine or blood, but a home pregnancy test will not show you the amount of this hormone, only whether you have enough of it to be considered pregnant. Knowing the actual level on a given date, however, is important if you want to be sure that the pregnancy is going well in its early stages.

How Many Embryos Should One Transfer: The IVF Dilemma

It is common knowledge that assisted reproduction methods, such as intrauterine insemination (IUI) and in vitro fertilization (IVF), when successful, often result in multiple pregnancy. Some wonna-be-moms, in fact, want to have twins or triplets, especially those who have tried to conceive for a long time—after all, having more than one baby at the same time seems to compensate for the many months or years lost in waiting. Doctors, however, frown at such possibilities. The optimal outcome of an assisted reproduction, they say, is a singleton pregnancy.