Roche found that serum for non pregnant premenopausal women - 97.5% =<1 mIU/mL, but the upper 95% confidence limit of the 97.5% percentile ranges up to 5.3 mIU/mL. Then they also found that for 181 non pregnant premenopausal women, 98.9% had values =<2 and the balance of 1.1% were =<7 mIU/mL . So what are various laboratories using this method taking as their cut-off?
If one took =<7 mIU/mL, one should not have any false positives, but one could miss very early pregnancy, however, do we know that damage could occur to a developing embryo at such low hCG levels? If most Radiology departments are relying on urinary pregnancy tests, then this level would not be detected anyway?
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