I wanted to share my experience of clear blue 3+ because the amount of anxiety this bought me was insane, and I couldn’t find anything anywhere about this.
If you don’t know, clear blue weekly tests show 3+ when you’re supposedly 5+ pregnant. I know they’re not super accurate but all of my friends had got them and during week 5, the fact I wasn’t getting one was REALLY stressing me out.
The clear blue instruction sheet says that the HCG threshold for week 3+ is approx 2700 so I was gutted I wasn’t at this level yet.
Due to the anxiety it bought me, I ended up paying about £200 for 2 private beta blood tests at 5w3days and 5w5days.
On the same day I was getting 2-3 on clear blue, my first beta came back at 3600. I was so confused - why didn’t I get the 3+ if I was over the threshold?! I told myself to try and relax and if all was good, I probably would get 3+ in 48 hours as I know urine isn’t as concentrated as blood- so maybe it needs day or so to catch up!
Fast forward to 5w5days and my 2nd beta came back at 5481 (there was about 40 hours difference between the 2 tests so the doctors said my levels are probably doubling every 72 hours).
Anyway, the night of 5w6days (as I got the results the day after), I took another clear blue because I was convinced I’d finally be 3+…. It came back as 2-3 again!!! At this point I felt so deflated and upset.
I did some research online and I stumbled across a clear blue weekly study where they had studied 200 women by taking their beta bloods and comparing to what they got on clear blue.
The graph is attached below, but as you can see… some people who would be getting 6k (etc) on their bloods look like they’re getting 2-3 and some are getting 3+.
it was obvious from the graph though that once women touched the 8k+ in bloods, they only then got 3+ (Nobody was getting 2-3 after that).
I sat down and based on the growth of my bloods, I worked out when I was likely to be reaching 8k+.
I worked out it would be the next morning (exactly 6 weeks).
And guess what?
It was! I got 3+ FINALLY when I hit 6 weeks!
I wanted to post this because I’ve seen other posts talk about the 3+ threshold… some have acknowledged it’s not quite 2700 and might even be 4k+…. But I haven’t seen anyone reference this study (literally published by clear blue themselves), which clearly shows some people can get 2-3 and some will get 3+ (even if they might be the same level!)
I know clear blue isn’t accurate and I’m not saying even at 8k+ it might be… but if this helps ANYONE who’s going through the same stress I did, it’s worth me posting x