Pee for Pregnant- Urine-Based Pregnancy Tests

Highlights:

Ancient and modern pregnancy tests work similarly: they detect a hormone in urine
Ancient Egyptian women urinated on barley or wheat seeds in the first documented pregnancy tests. Fast sprouting seedlings indicated pregnancy
The modern pregnancy tests rely on the fact that pregnant women’s urine contains a hormone called hCG, whereas non-pregnant women’s urine does not

We have far more in common with ancient people than we realize. For example, knowing if a woman was pregnant or not was just as useful 3,500 years ago as it is today. And, while some may dismiss many of the ancients’ scientific techniques - astrology was cutting-edge technology in ancient Egypt! You have to hand it to them. Some of their scientific approaches have proven to be rather accurate.

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‘A woman could tell if she was pregnant or not by urinating in two distinct bags, one filled with barley and the other with wheat, according to a book written on papyrus circa 1400 B.C.E. While this may seem to be pseudoscience, multiple studies suggest that it is 70% accurate.’

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Pregnancy Test in Anciet Egypt

According to several unpublished ancient Egyptian medical manuscripts in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, grain - notably barley and wheat - was used as a pregnancy test.

According to one papyrus text from around 1400 B.C.E., a woman might tell if she was pregnant or not by urinating in two distinct bags - one filled with barley and the other with wheat. If the grain in either bag germinated after being peed on, the woman was undoubtedly pregnant and could begin making plans appropriately.

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Can a Urine Test Determine the Gender of a Child

But hold on, there’s more! The mom merely had to wait and observe which of the grains grew first to determine the gender of her new kid. The kid would be a male if the barley sprouted first, and a girl if the wheat sprouted first.

According to the National Institute of Health, 1963 research discovered that this way of determining pregnancy is accurate approximately 70% of the time - not bad, ancient Egyptians - but it was completely inaccurate when it came to determining the sex of the baby.

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Science Behind Pregnancy Tests

Modern pregnancy tests rely on proteins that detect a hormone known as human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), but scientists believe that this old-fashioned test performed so effectively because higher levels of estrogen in a woman’s urine may have stimulated seed growth.

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How Pregnancy Testing Improvised

The urine-based pregnancy test has advanced in speed, accuracy, and feasibility since ancient Egypt. Urinating on grain seeds and watching them sprout was the oldest known test. The late 1920s saw the introduction of the first modern pregnancy tests, in which pregnant women’s urine was injected into animals, causing them to ovulate. These tests required mailing urine to a lab and the findings took at least a week to arrive. Beginning in 1960, antibodies enabled pregnancy testing to be performed in doctor’s offices, making pregnancy testing faster and more commonplace. An at-home version of this antibody-based test was available in Canada by 1971, but it did not reach the United States until 1977. In 1988, the first stick tests, comparable to the at-home tests available today, were produced.

Source-Medindia