The Apple Watch, or any smart watch, has multiple functions that help us on a daily basis, and some of them are related to health, such as heart rate measurement, which also allows us to keep track of the last few days .
But what does this have to do with pregnancy? A 34-year-old woman shared on Reddit that she noticed a slight variation in her heart rate recordings that allowed her to discover that she was pregnant .
“Apple Watch detected a higher resting heart rate for 15 days. I started to investigate why and it turned out that I was newly pregnant…”
She explains that she is breastfeeding her 18-month-old son and that she has not yet had her period after giving birth. We already know that breastfeeding can make you go years without your period because the prolactin produced by the baby’s suckling inhibits the ovulation mechanisms in women while they are breastfeeding.
In this way, if you get pregnant, it is not possible to know, since the most obvious symptom, the lack of menstruation, already has it.
But according to this woman, the Apple Watch told her. He had noticed that his resting heart rate had increased slightly in the last 15 days from previous measurements, “approximately 57 to 72” beats. She read that this sometimes happens in early pregnancy and when she took the pregnancy test, she did indeed come back positive .
Can Heart Rate Predict Pregnancy?
At the beginning of pregnancy, the woman’s body undergoes great changes, and one of them is cardiovascular changes due to an increase in the blood volume necessary to house the baby.
Heart rate is the number of heart contractions or beats we have per minute. The average value of heart rate considered normal in adults is 60 to 100 beats per minute (at rest) and the heart rate of a woman is also within this range, whether or not she is pregnant.
Also keep in mind that heart rate is not the same from one person to another. A young person generally has a higher pulse rate than an older person, overweight people have a higher heart rate than thin people, and a professional athlete may have a “normal” heart rate below 60 beats. That is, it is highly variable.
It is true that the heart rate increases in pregnancy, but it does so gradually throughout pregnancy , and at the end of pregnancy it can increase by 10-20 beats, going from 60-70 beats per minute at the beginning of pregnancy to 80 -90 clicks in recent weeks, as we see in the following graph.
Apart from this, it is necessary to know that a pulse higher than 130-140 or lower than 50 can be dangerous for the fetus and you should see a doctor.
Do not trust the Apple Watch as a pregnancy test
With all this explanation we want to say that it is true that the heart rate can have a slight variation during pregnancy, but it is not always the case in all women. Similarly, an increase in heart rate can be due to other factors that have nothing to do with being pregnant.
Therefore, if you notice a variation in your heart rate thanks to your smart watch and you want to know if you are pregnant, the most reliable method to find out is to take a pregnancy test that confirms it .
Apple Watch Series 8 helps you get pregnant
The truth is that smart watches are increasingly helping to control our health and the new Apple Watch Series 8 incorporates a very useful function related to female reproductive health.
Thanks to two sensors that take the temperature of the wrist, it helps to estimate the probable day of ovulation, thus improving predictions of the menstrual cycle and the probability of pregnancy.
This is because the basal temperature , the one we present when our body has been at rest for at least four hours, increases slightly, between 0.3ºC and 0.5ºC in the 2 or 3 days after ovulation.
However, we must know that there are other signs that you are ovulating, such as changes in cervical fluid, changes in the cervix, and in some women, increased sexual desire, mild colic, breast tenderness or slight spotting.
Photo | Karolina Grabowska – Pexels
