Is he pregnant? Or could he have cancer?

A positive pregnancy test might also test positive for cancer

A positive pregnancy test may also show a positive result for the presence of cancerous cells. (Denver Post file photo)

You might’ve heard the story: A young man came across an ex-girlfriend’s OTC pregnancy test in his bathroom, the kind that reacts to hormones in urine by showing one stripe (for Not) or two stripes (for Start Saving For College). For grins, he decided to see what happened if he peed on the strip.

Was he surprised when two stripes showed up! He told a friend, who made a rage comic about it and posted it on the (warning, incredibly addicting) social media aggregator site Reddit.com. Almost immediately, a comment went up from a Reddit member who also is a medical student, warning that the positive result might mean the man had testicular cancer. (The Livestrong website also had a reference to cancer and pregnancy tests last year.)

The medical student, who goes by Wecancallmeb, explained “Pregnancy tests are based on levels of human chorionic gonadotropin which is produced by the placenta, but in a male it can be elevated by testicular cancer.” Go here for the mind-numbing science-y explanation from the U.S. National Library of Medicine,

Here’s a less-technical explanation from another Reddit user, BadScienceGuy:

The process used to determine pregnancy in blood or urine samples is also used to determine the presence of “cancer cancer in men and women when not looking for pregnancy. It’s called Beta-HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) and raises when women get pregnant in the first trimester. From a level of basically nothing (a negative result is around <10 or something) and to 100s of thousands. It is also raised in certain types of cancer (testicular in males, not sure in females) and is measured using the exact same chemistry whether for pregnancy or cancer.

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