Pregnancy Tests and Testicular Cancer

An amazing example of the power of online communities...

Last week, I girl posted a funny comic to the online community Reddit about her male friend who used his girlfriend's unopened pregnancy test to jokingly see if he was "pregnant". The funny part of the comic was that the pregnancy test was positive! You may be thinking: Ha, ha. Guys can't be pregnant, what a faulty test... 

Wrong attitude! There is validity behind a male testing positive on a pregnancy test. 

Pregnancy tests (the ones you urinate on and wait for the blue line to appear or not), test the level of the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in the urine. In pregnant females, the level of this hormone drastically increases after ovulation; hCG levels increase so much that some spill into the urine, hence why pregnancy tests are able to pick it up (within 6 and 12 days after ovulation).

However, hCG has more roles in the body than simply being used as a pregnancy marker. In fact, hCG  is a great cancer marker for some cancers (cancers of sex organs, such as those affecting the ovaries, uterus, and testicles). Therefore, if a male takes a pregnancy test and it tests positive, it may indicate that he has testicular cancer. 

...so, back to our story: after the "funny" comic was posted to Reddit, tons of comments were posted advising the original comic poster that the man who took the pregnancy test should go see a doctor to be screened for testicular cancer. The girl who posted the comic replied saying that she had no idea that this was serious; she simply thought it was funny! Nevertheless, she immediately contacted her male friend and he went to the doctor.  Low and behold: he had a small tumor present on his testicle! She posted his results to Reddit and thanked the community for their diagnostics skills. The male and the original comic poster were both from Hamilton, Ontario, by the way.

Quite the story, right? Read the whole story (which made the national news) here.