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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful: |
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Persona and babies |
April 21, 2007 |
| Reviewer:
nikki99
from England
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I brought my persona monitor last year after i and my husband had been trying for a baby for a while with no sucess.
The persona monitor is a device which detects when you are fertile and when you are NOT during your monthly cycle.
Sounds good well there are some draw backs.
Firstly on the first day of your cycle you enter day one into the monitor then a green light will apear (which means it is safe to have sex and not get pregnant )
By day six you get a yellow light which means you have to test using a test stick.
know when you buy your monitor you get 16 test sticks which you will use during the first month after that you have to buy them. They cost about £10 and you get 8 which will last you one month quite expensive i think espacially if you are using this monitor as contraception.
Then during the month you will get red days which mean there is a chance of conpection
green days which you are safe and
yellow days which means to test.
When the monitor detects the fertile hormnome you get a little o this lasts for two days
The first few months you do get a lot of red days which if you are using this monitor to avoid getting pregnant is not very good.
If you are using it to get pregnant it is good although during the year which i have used it ,twice it not detect ovuation which is essential in trying to concive.
I would like to point out that i did get pregnant using this and i will be using it again.
My overall view of this item it that it is good for trying to get pregnant but i would not recommend it if you are trying not to concive
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful: |
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Usless as a Contraception!! |
April 21, 2007 |
| Reviewer:
Ellie31
from England
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I got pregnant in only the second month of using Persona, despite using it exactly as instructed and in fact being even more careful than advised (we treated the first "green day" after supposed ovulation as if it was a "red day", to give ourselves extra protection - or so we thought). It turns out that the Persona monitor relies on data from the previous cycle as well as the hormone tests, which isn't really what their advertising suggests - so if your cycles differ even slightly in length it could very easily give you the wrong result by predicting your ovulation on the wrong day. Don't waste your money on Persona, it just isn't reliable - save your cash for something that actually works.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful: |
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Didn't mean to get pregnant! |
April 21, 2007 |
| Reviewer:
Yvonne D.
from England
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I was attracted to persona as it was completely non-intrusive. No barriers, no hormone alterations causing increased appetites, and no side effects.
The idea is simple, you use test sticks to calculate when your due to ovalate, the machine learns your patterns so you test less often as you go on, and the machine will show a green light if your safe to have sex, but a red light if your not.
To be able to use this you need a regular cycle of an average length. So if you suffer from irregular periods disregard this one from the start.
I used this happily for around a year, however caught for a child despire proper use. (It looks as if I ovulated early one month before the machine picked it up).
In short, this isn't the most reliable form of contraception so if you really cannot risk getting pregnant at this time, it is not the best option for you. However if you are short of options, or the risk is not a major issue, then you may find it worth a try.
You also need to take the cost into account as not only do you need to initially by the machine, you also need to buy test sticks on a fairly regular basis.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful: |
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How it Works |
April 21, 2007 |
| Reviewer:
Ali72
from England
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How it works – the theory
Persona works by testing your early morning urine in order to monitor changes in your hormone levels. The hormones it tracks are the two that mainly control your monthly cycle: luteinising hormone (LH) and a urinary metabolite of estradiol (an estrogen). Now, we all remember from O level Biology don’t we (ooops, GCSE, showing my age there) that LH is the hormone that has a big surge in the middle of your cycle, causing an egg to be released. This is the surge that ovulation prediction kits aim to detect. Persona helpfully displays an egg symbol (an o with a dot in it) to indicate that you should ovulate within the next one or two days. But strangely, I never saw this…(can you see where this is going yet?)
The monitor reads, stores and uses the hormone information to tell you whether it’s a “Green” or “Red” day. On Green days you don’t need to use any additional contraception if you choose to have sex. In theory, you should abstain on Red days, and this is what the 94% effectiveness measure of Persona is based on. The monitor learns more about your cycle over progressive months, so you should get fewer and fewer red days with use until typically, you get between 6 to 12 Red days per cycle.
How it works – the practice
You have to wait until the first day of your period to start using Persona. Just to make it slightly complicated, if your period starts late in the day, you should wait until the following morning to start using it. You “tell” the monitor that your period has started by pushing a button marked “M”, and the display screen on the front then displays “1” for Day 1 of your cycle.
The time that you push the button is important. This sets a “testing window” which is six hours long – from 3 hours before the time at which you pushed the button, to 3 hours afterwards. This is the time period during which, every day, you need to “consult” your monitor to get your contraceptive advice for the day; either a “green” light is lit up (go get ‘im tiger) or a red one is lit (take a cold shower). This is also when the monitor will let you know whether you need to do a urine test that day. This needs to be done with the first wee of the day, so it’s important to remember to look at the monitor BEFORE you use the toilet! Mine lives on top of the cistern. It’s very unobtrusive, since it has a hinged lid that hides all the workings underneath. It just sits there looking like a posh white box. Men probably think it has tampons in.
If you need to do a test, using the test sticks is easy. They are individually foil-wrapped – just tear it open, and wee on the white absorbent fabric end. Then take the cap off the handle and cover the wet end. There is a slot in the monitor to insert the stick into, and the monitor flashes a yellow light to let you know that it’s reading it. When the light finishes flashing, you take the stick out and throw it away.
For the first month, you will need to do 16 tests, and that is why 2 packs of sticks are included in the Starter pack. If you start to re-use the monitor after an extended period of not using it, for example, after a pregnancy (!) you will need to re-set the monitor and follow the same procedure – in this case, you need to make sure that you purchase 2 packs of sticks with the same Lot Number printed on the box.
In subsequent months, you will be asked for a maximum of 8 tests. Packs of 8 test sticks are available in chemists.
That’s about all you need to know really about using the thing – at the start of your next period, simply push the “M” button again, and away you go.
So – why did I consider stopping using Persona after only a few months, and why am I glad that I didn’t? Well, the instruction booklet does warn that Persona must not be used by women with cycles shorter than 23 days or cycles longer than 35 days. My periods used to be very irregular – very short cycles, occasionally interspersed with the odd long one. But I guess I never really paid close attention. Anyway, I seemed to have an awful lot of Red days but as the months slipped by and we failed to get pregnant, I did notice that I had never seen the egg symbol referred to in the Persona booklet. After a year of trying, we went to see our GP and were referred to an infertility specialist. She explained that there were a number of reasons for infertility, but she was fairly certain that my problem was hormonal. It was a big help to have been tracking my cycle for the previous year. Sure enough, within 3 months (which is how long it took to get up to a therapeutic dose of Clomid) we were pregnant.
After baby #1, I decided to carry on using Persona. The best thing was that the infertility specialist had told me that hormonal imbalances often “cure” themselves after pregnancy. When I saw the egg symbol appear for the first time on its own, I knew this was the case for me – and sure enough when we decided to try for baby #2 (and allowed for plenty of fun trying) we got pregnant first go ;-)
So, clearly Persona isn’t for everyone as a means of contraception. It’s slightly less reliable than the Pill for example (and probably much less reliable if you don’t abstain on Red days) and obviously doesn’t protect against STDs. The marketing blurb states “Persona is not recommended for women for whom pregnancy is totally unacceptable”. Bit of a cop-out for a contraceptive eh?
On the other hand, it’s great for tracking your cycle if you WANT to get pregnant. The test sticks are cheaper than ovulation sticks (which are £17.99 per month for a pack of 5 in Boots) although you do have the initial outlay for the monitor. Plus, ovulation kits rely on you testing at the right time in your cycle, so if your cycles are irregular, I think that Persona would be more likely to give you an accurate picture of what’s going on. Blimey, who knew it was so complicated?
One final point – the testing window. Gets very confusing if you are flying through time zones. Plane toilets are not the place to be whipping out test sticks! (Baby #2 was not conceived in the UK lol).
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