Are At-Home Fertility ests Useless?

The at home tests said to measure your fertility levels, may not be worthless, but they may not be as useful as previously thought, according to a new study done by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

The study found that the cutoffs used by such infertility tests, which measure levels of a molecule called follicle stimulating hormone or FSH, label many women as infertile who actually go on to have children naturally.

It also suggests that another hormone, called antimullerian hormone or AMH, could prove to be a much better harbinger of infertility. The study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, held in Denver, Colorado this week, indicated that AMH, FSH's sister hormone, was vastly superior at predicting fertility. Unfortunately, AMH can only be measured in the blood and not the urine, and even the blood test has not been approved for clinical use.

What does that mean for you? You might want to pocket that money you were going to spend on the fertility test and make a docotr's appointment instead.