At home testing (female)

[dancingqueen345]

Hi
Sorry if this has been covered before..

Can anyone recommend a brand/test that I can do at home to check my 'fertility levels', if such a thing exists?

I don't have children yet but plan to in a year or 2 but following friends who have struggled to conceive I just want to try and understand if we're likely to have problems (so I can start thinking about it now) or not.

[dancingqueen345]

Hi both, thank you very much for your replies. I am overthinking.

I certainly hope I didn't come across as insensitivite to others who are currently struggling.

[icy121]

How old are you? Are you on the pill or do you have "real" periods? If you have real periods, are they regular? Are your periods very painful or pretty much fine?

If you're under 30, normal cycle and no pain there's no indication anything will be amiss and frankly a home test won't tell you anything. Save your money. The vast, vast majority of couples conceive within a year (high 80s%), this goes up to about 93% within 2 years.

If you have endo, PCOS, fibroids, other gynae issues then clearly that's different - but again, until you start to try you won't know!

Don't worry about something that hasn't happened yet, is my advice. Hopefully you'll never need to visit this board again.....

[Chattycat78]

As I understand it, the only home test you can get is the fsh testing kit. This tells you how hard your body is having to work to ovulate. The harder, the more difficult supposedly it will be to get pregnant.

However, tbh I'm not sure how useful this is. Main reasons being:

• if your fsh levels are high, it means you have less eggs and are closer to the menopause. However, it doesn't tell you if any of these eggs are any good or not, which is what counts when getting pregnant.
  
• the test won't tell you if you have any other fertility issues, such as blocked tubes, whether you're ovulating, whether you have endometriosis which can also cause fertility issues.
  

Sorry I probably haven't helped there!