- 1. Abdominal cramps
- 2. Breast tenderness
- 3. Excessive tiredness
- 4. Mood swings
- 5. Repulsion for strong smells
- How to confirm if it is pregnancy
- What is the first week of pregnancy?
During the first week of pregnancy the symptoms are still very subtle and few women can really understand that something is changing in their body.
However, it is during the first days after fertilization that the greatest hormonal changes occur, as the body is no longer in a constant menstrual cycle. Thus, some women may report symptoms such as abdominal colic, increased breast tenderness, excessive tiredness, mood swings or disgust for stronger smells, for example.
See also what symptoms may appear during the 1st month.
1. Abdominal cramps
This is a very common symptom during a woman's life, which usually happens during periods of major hormonal change, such as during pregnancy, or simply during menstruation. However, and unlike the menstrual cycle, in pregnancy, this symptom is not accompanied by bleeding .
In addition to abdominal colic, the woman may also notice that the belly is slightly more swollen than normal. This is not due to the fetus, which is still in a microscopic embryonic phase, but due to the action of hormones on the tissues of the uterus and the entire female reproductive system.
2. Breast tenderness
Right after fertilization, the woman's body enters a phase of major hormonal changes and one of the first signs that can be identified is the increased sensitivity in the breasts. This is because breast tissue is very sensitive to hormonal changes, being one of the first places in the body to prepare for pregnancy.
Although the sensitivity can be noticed in the first week, many women only report this discomfort after 3 or 4 weeks, along with changes in the nipples and areola, which can become darker.
3. Excessive tiredness
Most pregnant women report the appearance of fatigue, or excessive tiredness, only after 3 or 4 weeks, but there are also some reports of women who experienced unexplained tiredness shortly after fertilization.
Usually, this tiredness is related to the increase in the hormone progesterone in the body, which has the side effect of an increase in drowsiness and decreased energy during the day.
4. Mood swings
Mood swings are another symptom that can appear during the first week and are often not even understood by the woman herself as a sign of pregnancy, only confirmed when the woman gets a positive pharmacy test.
These variations happen due to the oscillation of hormones, which can lead the woman to have feelings of joy and, in an immediate moment, to feel sadness and even irritability.
5. Repulsion for strong smells
With the intense variations in hormonal levels, women also tend to become more sensitive to smells, and may be repulsed by more intense smells, such as perfumes, cigarettes, spicy foods or gasoline, for example.
Like mood swings, these repulsions for strong smells tend to go unnoticed, at least until the moment the woman takes the pregnancy test.
How to confirm if it is pregnancy
Since many of the symptoms of the first week of pregnancy are similar to those that occur at other times in a woman's life, due to hormonal changes, they should not be seen as an infallible way to confirm the pregnancy.
Thus, the ideal is for the woman to do a pharmacy test in the first 7 days after the delay of menstruation, or else, to consult an obstetrician to perform a blood test to identify the levels of the hormones beta HCG, which is a type of hormone that is only produced during pregnancy.
Better understand when pregnancy tests should be done and how they work.
What is the first week of pregnancy?
The first week of pregnancy is considered by the obstetrician to be the week from the first day of the last menstruation. This means that during this week the woman is not yet in fact pregnant, as the new egg has not yet been released and, thus, cannot have been fertilized by sperm to generate a pregnancy.
However, what the woman considers to be the first week of pregnancy is the 7 days immediately after the fertilization of the egg, which only happens after 2 weeks of the gestational age considered by the doctor. Thus, the week that is popularly considered the first week of pregnancy happens, in fact, around the third week of pregnancy in the doctor's calculations, or the third week after menstruation.
