At-home ovulation predictor kits accurate, similar despite price differences

Key takeaways:

• Ovulation predictor kit accuracy was similar across five tests ranging from 91.75% to 96.9%.
• Fewer participants reported being likely to purchase and use the Clinical Guard kit vs. other kits.

Five tested at-home ovulation predictor kits had high accuracy and performed similarly despite wide price differences between kits, according to study findings published in Fertility and Sterility.

There are more than 20 at-home ovulation predictor kits commercially available in the U.S., leaving consumers with “an abundance of choice” without much data to guide decision-making, according to Anna Vanderhoff, MD, fellow in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the Center for Infertility and Reproductive Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues.

“Commercially available kits have a wide variation in cost, with individual test strip prices ranging from less than 20 cents to more than $3 per strip. They also have significant differences in the level of sophistication of the test result output,” Vanderhoff and colleagues wrote. “Despite this wide variation, few studies have tested multiple ovulation predictor kits in parallel.”

Vanderhoff and colleagues conducted a prospective cohort study with 23 women (mean age, 35.44 years) from the Center for Infertility and Reproductive Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with regular menses who underwent monitored natural cycle frozen embryo transfer, timed intercourse and intrauterine insemination with daily blood luteinizing hormone level monitoring from December 2022 to March 2024. Researchers provided all participants with five different commercially available at-home ovulation predictor kits that measured urine luteinizing hormone: Premom Easy@Home, Wondfo, Pregmate, Clearblue Easy Ovulation Kit and Clinical Guard. Prices ranged from 18 cents to $1.70 per test strip.

The primary outcome was ovulation predictor kit accuracy, defined as concordance between test results and blood luteinizing hormone level above or below 25 mIU/mL. Secondary outcomes included ovulation predictor kit surge detection, positive and negative predictive value, sensitivity and specificity.

All participants completed 97 total days of testing with the kits, or an average of 4.2 days of testing per participant, with 13 documenting blood luteinizing hormone surge during testing.

Compared with blood luteinizing hormone surge, ovulation predictor kit surge detection accuracy was similar across all five kits, ranging from 91.75% to 96.9%. However, sensitivity was better for the Easy@Home (75%), Wondfo (69.23%) and Pregmate (76.92%) tests compared with Clearblue (61.54%) and Clinical Guard (38.46%).

Researchers observed no clinically significant differences between all tested kits regarding positive or negative predictive value or specificity of surge detection.

Participants reported similar experiences with all five kits, but fewer participants reported being likely to purchase and use the Clinical Guard kit (30.4%) compared with Easy@Home (82.6%), Wondfo (65.2%), Pregmate (60.8%) and Clearblue (78.2%).

“The more expensive ovulation predictor kits did not perform better and did not receive higher consumer experience scores, so clinicians and patients alike should feel secure that by not choosing the most expensive kits they are not harming their ability to detect their luteinizing hormone surge,” the researchers wrote.