Top pregnancy signs

Common pregnancy signs include:

• Food aversions. If you’re newly pregnant, it’s not uncommon to feel repelled by the smell of a sandwich or a cup of coffee, and for certain aromas to trigger your gag reflex. Though no one knows for sure, this may be a side effect of rapidly increasing amounts of oestrogen in your system. You may also find that certain foods you used to enjoy are suddenly completely repulsive to you.
• Mood swings. It’s common to have mood swings during pregnancy, partly because of hormonal changes that affect your levels of neurotransmitters (chemical messengers in the brain). Everyone responds differently to these changes. Some moms-to-be experience heightened emotions, both good and bad; others feel more depressed or anxious.
• Abdominal bloating. Hormonal changes in early pregnancy may leave you feeling bloated, similar to the feeling some women have just before their period. That’s why your clothes may feel more snug than usual at the waistline, even early on when your uterus is still quite small.
• Tender, swollen breasts. One of the early signs of pregnancy is sensitive, sore breasts caused by rising levels of hormones. The soreness and swelling may feel like an exaggerated version of how your breasts feel before your period. Your discomfort should diminish significantly after the first trimester, as your body adjusts to the hormonal changes.
• Frequent urination. Shortly after you become pregnant, hormonal changes prompt a chain of events that raise the rate of blood flow through your kidneys. This causes your bladder to fill more quickly, so you need to urinate more often. This symptom may start as early as six weeks into your first trimester.
• Fatigue. No one knows for sure what causes early pregnancy fatigue, but it’s possible that rapidly increasing levels of the hormone progesterone are contributing to your sleepiness. Of course, morning sickness and having to urinate frequently during the night can add to your sluggishness, too. You should start to feel more energetic once you hit your second trimester, although fatigue usually returns late in pregnancy when you’re carrying around a lot more weight and some of the common discomforts of pregnancy make it more difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
• Nausea. For some women, morning sickness doesn’t hit until about a month after conception, though for others it may start a week or two earlier. And not just in the morning, either, pregnancy related nausea can be a problem morning, noon, or night.
• A missed cycle. If you’re usually pretty regular and your cycle doesn’t arrive on time, you may decide to do a pregnancy test before you notice any of the above symptoms. But if you’re not regular or you’re not keeping track of your cycle, nausea and breast tenderness and extra trips to the bathroom may signal pregnancy before you realise you didn’t get your cycle.
• A positive home pregnancy test. In spite of what you might read on the box, many home pregnancy tests are not sensitive enough to reliably detect pregnancy until about a week after a missed cycle. So if you decide to take a test earlier than that and get a negative result, try again in a few days. Remember that a baby starts to develop before you can tell you’re pregnant, so take care of your health while you’re waiting to find out.

q Information obtained from www.babycenter.com