How to check for ovulation at home (DIY)

pregnant lady

Ovulation is the time where the eggs are released from the ovaries for fertilization. Every month, hormones from the pituitary gland stimulate the ovaries to release an egg or ovulate. Once the egg is released, it travels the Fallopian tube. It is the best time to conceive. The egg is active for about 24 hours to get unite with the sperm. Sperm cells can survive in the reproductive tract for 2 to 3 days. So, it is advisable to have regular sex during the days leading up to ovulation. An ovulation home test is used to help identify the time in the menstrual cycle when a woman is most prominent to get pregnant.

READ ABOUT: hCG pregnancy test

Things to watch out for

1. Do not drink large amounts of fluids before using the test.

2. Ask your doctor if you need to stop taking certain drugs before using this test.

3. Drugs that can decrease LH measurements include estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Estrogen and progesterone may be found in birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy.

4. The drug clomiphene citrate (Clomid) can increase LH levels. This drug is used to help trigger ovulation. Women taking this drug should wait three days after stopping the medicine before checking their LH levels.

5. The specific time of month that you start testing depends on the length of your menstrual cycle.

6. The test involves normal urination. There is no pain or discomfort.

DIY Steps

Ovulation prediction test kits usually come with five to seven sticks. This is used to help predict ovulation. The test works by detecting a rise in luteinizing hormone in urine. This rise signals the ovary to release the egg. While trying to get pregnant, the couples should intercourse around ovulation when ovaries release eggs. For women with 28 day menstrual cycle, this release normally occurs between days 11 – 14. If you have an irregular menstrual cycle and are not sure when or if you are ovulating, an ovulation prediction kit can help.

1. Missing the surge

If you miss a day, you may miss your surge. You may also miss recording a surge if you have an irregular menstrual cycle.

2. Keep an eye on calendar

Use a simple calendar to mark the day your periods begin each month and track the number of days each period lasts. If you have a consistent 28-day cycle. Ovulation (link to ovulation calculator) is likely to begin about 14 days after the day your last period began.

3. Fertile days

If your periods are long, subtract 18 from the number of days in your shortest cycle. When your next periods begin, count ahead this many days. The next week is a reasonable guess for the fertile days.

4. Basal body temperature

Normal body temperature is measured every morning using a thermometer. The ovulation is indicated by rise of temperature.

5. Cervical fluid

Changing pattern of cervical mucus throughout the cycle is an excellent indicator of fertility. The cervical fluid becomes wet and has an egg white-quality during fertility period.

6. Cervical position

Check your cervix daily or when you are experiencing the egg white type of fluid and fertility is assumed when the cervix changes from being low, thick and closed to being high and open.

7. Try ovulation monitoring kit

These kits can be bought at most drug store. It tests the urine hormones that are seen during ovulation. You will need to urinate on the test stick, or place the stick into urine that has been collected into a sterile container. The test stick will turn a certain color or display a positive sign if a surge is detected. A positive result means you should ovulate in the next 24 to 36 hours, but this may not be the case for all women. The kit’s instruction booklet will tell you how to properly read the results. The test involves normal urination. There is no pain or discomfort. A positive result indicates an “LH surge” and is a sign that ovulation may soon occur. Read your specific manufacturer’s instruction booklet for complete details.

If you are unable to detect a surge or do not become pregnant after using an ovulation prediction kit for several months, contact your doctor. You may need to see an infertility specialist.

Is COVID-19 the last pandemic to human kind?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we never had to face another pandemic? As we reflect on the past year, the words that come to mind are “never again”. Never again should more than 120,000 lives be lost to a contagious virus, a number that would have been unthinkable almost a year ago, when government advisers thought that losing 20,000 people would be a good outcome. Nor should we endure another year of lockdowns, and the pain of job losses and unemployment that followed. And nobody ever wants to see children taken out of school for 21 weeks of the year again, unable to learn in classrooms or see their friends.

But scientists are clear that we will face another pandemic in the future. Most agree the question is when, not if. In 2018, I gave a talk at the Hay festival outlining a scenario that was loosely based on recent news reports: a farmer becomes infected with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium from a pig in China, spreading this infection through their community and then boarding a plane to the UK. The worrying thing about this scenario is that such bacteria, which evade our antibiotics of last resort, are already upon us. They could yet be the source of a future pandemic.

Or perhaps the next pandemic will be caused by a virus spilling over from animals to humans, much like Covid-19. Recent reports that the first humans have been infected with avian influenza at a poultry plant in Russia give a worrying glimpse of how close we live to such risks. Every time a virus circulates among animals, particularly bats, rodents, livestock and birds, and then comes into contact with humans, there’s a chance it will infect people and lead to human transmission.

Wherever the next pandemic comes from, Britain must think long term about its ability to respond and must ensure it is prepared. Key to this will be working together with other governments to establish robust response systems. Over the past year, the UK has already built many of the structures that will be needed to address a future pandemic. We now have a huge testing capacity, processes in place for fast-tracking vaccine development and protocols for undertaking rapid research in hospitals. But more needs to be done at a global level to ensure we’re truly prepared.

International travel and trade have connected countries and created new opportunities for diseases to spread. This is why we need global surveillance to identify disease risks. Just as we have a weather service, governments should invest in a global virus surveillance network to scan for new pathogens of concern, and identify and mitigate the risks of animal viruses crossing over into human populations. It’s not only new pathogens we should be afraid of, but new variants of existing viruses. Already, we’ve seen variants of the virus that causes Covid-19 arising in countries such as England, Brazil and South Africa, and we could yet see the emergence of a new strain of influenza that leads to a global flu pandemic.

This is why it’s essential for countries to have sequencing facilities to detect and track new strains and assess whether booster shots of vaccines are needed. Not all countries have the sequencing facilities that we benefit from in the UK, and it’s imperative we invest resources to ensure other countries also have the infrastructures that would allow them to rapidly identify and sequence new viruses. The World Bank has a particularly crucial role to play in supporting countries financially, while the World Health Organization should provide technical assistance to build up these core capacities for outbreak detection.

The second crucial area of investment will be in vaccine development. While vaccines for Covid-19 have been developed and manufactured at remarkable speed, we’ll need to be even quicker next time to avoid the case numbers, deaths and restrictions we have all endured over the past year. Developing the vaccine is only half the battle: as recent tussles over limited supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine have shown, countries will also need to think critically about their manufacturing capacity, and coordinate with other governments to create regional hubs that allow for mass vaccine production and delivery.

We should be applying these principles not just to new viruses, but to those we already know about. Flu epidemics occur every winter and cause an estimated 650,000 deaths across the world each year, largely among young children, pregnant women and elderly adults. Pandemic influenza, which would involve the global outbreak of a new flu virus that evades our immunity, could be disastrous. The 1918 flu pandemic infected roughly one-third of the world’s population and killed 50-100 million people worldwide, while the death rate for 15-34-year-olds was 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years.

The UK government lists pandemic flu in its national risk register. Yet in planning for a flu pandemic, governments have largely focused on mitigating outbreaks by building enough hospitals to ensure people can access care, rather than on suppressing the spread of a virus while deploying a universal influenza vaccine. Our seasonal flu vaccines are given annually and are informed by expert predictions about which strains will become the most common. As the next big push after Covid-19, the UK should be aiming to develop a single-dose universal vaccine that protects against multiple influenza strains. The first human clinical trial of a universal flu vaccine has already been successfully completed, and now we must accelerate this progress.

Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, many commentators focused on the question of whether or not coronavirus was like seasonal flu. Not only did this misunderstand the unique risks of Covid-19, it also underestimated the danger of a novel flu pandemic. In the future, the UK should treat all pathogens – whether novel influenza or Covid-19 – as threats. In the process of managing Covid-19, we have inadvertently almost eliminated seasonal flu, which shows just how much we can achieve if we needed to suppress dangerous pathogens in the future.

The scientific leaps that have been made over the past year, including the production of multiple vaccines and treatments for Covid-19, can seem like magic. In fact, these advances reflect years of research and training building on the work of previous scientists. Historic breakthroughs, such as the discovery of penicillin in 1928, the polio vaccine in 1961 and the MMR vaccine in 1963, were possible because of the work of multiple scientists, biologists, virologists, geneticists, engineers and mathematicians.

The same goes for the response to Covid-19. The importance of science has never been more obvious, and governments should be pouring resources into the sector rather than pulling back. News that the government plans to cut the budget of UK research funding, which will cost the sector an estimated £1bn and deal a serious blow to science, is particularly concerning. Now is the time to invest in science and research. It’s only by doing this that we’ll be truly prepared when the next pandemic arrives.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh 

Bacteria Could Be The First Organisms Found to Use Quantum Effects to Survive

 

Oxygen is life to animals like us. But for many species of microbe, the smallest whiff of the highly reactive element puts their delicate chemical machinery at risk of rusting up.

The photosynthesizing bacterium Chlorobium tepidum has evolved a clever way to shield its light-harvesting processes from oxygen's poisonous effects, using a quantum effect to shift its energy production line into low gear.

A study conducted by scientists from the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis has shown how the bacterium throws a spanner into its quantum resonance to 'tune' its system so that it loses energy in the presence of oxygen, preventing it from wrecking its photosynthetic apparatus.

Our everyday experience of solid reality seems a million miles away from the phantom landscape of quantum effects, where an object's nature is a smear of possibility until an observation locks them into place.

Far from solid spheres clicking together, the particles making up our atoms and molecules resonate with possibility, refusing to settle until the dice of chance stack high enough for a particular reaction to become inevitable.

While this much is clear, there remain questions over how often something as complex as a living system actively exploits the finer features of quantum mechanics in the name of survival.

"Before this study, the scientific community saw quantum signatures generated in biological systems and asked the question: Were these results just a consequence of biology being built from molecules, or did they have a purpose?" explains University of Chicago chemist Greg Engel.

Evidence that quantum effects can be woven into living systems has been building for some time.

A recent study showed how changes in a magnetic field influence an electron's spin in light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes, a phenomenon that might explain how some animals can detect our planet's magnetosphere.

Identifying a subtle nudging of quantum influence in a sensory reaction is one thing, though. Observing it at the core of an organism's survival is quite something else.

"This is the first time we are seeing biology actively exploiting quantum effects," says Engel.

As a strictly anaerobic bacterium, C. tepidum isn't keen on having oxygen run rampant through its guts. What is useful in releasing energy from glucose inside our cells destroys the apparatus for turning light into chemical bonds inside the microbe.

Key to this chain of transformative reactions is a cluster of proteins and pigments called the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex. It acts as a mediator between the system's light-harvesting components and the factory floor where energy is converted into chemistry.

It was initially thought that FMO relies on quantum coherence to do its work, matching the wave-like nature of particles in order to facilitate the transfer of electrons efficiently.

Later studies forced a rethink on the role of this strictly quantum phenomenon in FMO operation, claiming that, if anything, quantum coherence might actually slow the whole process down.

In this latest exploration of quantum coherence within FMO, researchers are taking into account the effect oxygen might have on the whole system.

Using an ultrafast laser spectroscopy technique to capture details on the complex's activity, the team showed how the presence of oxygen could change how energy was 'steered' from the light-harvesting components into the reaction center.

They found a pair of cysteine molecules sat at the core of the operation, acting as a trigger by releasing a proton whenever they reacted with any oxygen that happened to be present.

This lost proton directly affected the quantum mechanisms within the FMO complex, effectively shuffling energy away from areas that would otherwise be open to oxidation.

While it means the bacterium is temporarily deprived of energy, the quantum interruption forces the cell to hold its breath until it can be clear of oxygen's toxic effects.

"The simplicity of the mechanism suggests that it might be found in other photosynthetic organisms across the evolutionary landscape," says lead author Jake Higgins, a graduate student at the The University of Chicago's Department of Chemistry.

"If more organisms are able to dynamically modulate quantum mechanical couplings in their molecules to produce larger changes in physiology, there could be a whole new set of effects selected for by nature that we don't yet know about."

There could be a whole world of quantum biology just waiting to be discovered.

This research was published in PNAS.