2.5 mg of finasteride vs .5mg of avodart NEED HELP!

[Rottingman]

Did a 5 hour roundtrip to ny yesterday for a hair loss consult with Dr.Bernstein. He basically told me I had dpa not dupa(which I thought) and was surprised that I didn't respond to finasteride. He told me I would probably respond to a higher dose and wrote me a script for 5 mg proscar and wants me to take a half a day. I asked him about avodart and he said he no longer recommends it because of potential side effects of dht inhibition in the brain. Basically according to him it's too risky of a medication to take longterm. I was pretty disappointed with my consult with him. Waste of time and money imo. I was hoping he would have spent a little more time with me or considered other causes of my hairloss considering I have no recession and diffuse thinning all over.

So my question to you guys is should I give finasteride another go with a higher dose of 2.5 mg daily or go straight to the avodart. Keep in mind I was on finasteride for 5 years but I was drinking like 14 beers or so everyday was a super fat slob and eating extremely unhealthy. Dunno if that could have impacted things at all but I am much healthier now and workout daily. Looking to start treatment asap so anyone with input on this please respond!8O

 

[massa]

If you feel like your hair loss is aggressive then Avodart would be best. Keep in mind that 2.5mg of finasteride supresses almost the same DHT as 1mg so it might not do a great deal. As far as side effects go if you were fine on propecia then the chances are youll be fine on dutasteride but then again nothings for certain. Im not sure any doctor in the world prescribes dutasteride for male pattern baldness you have to get in without consent they tend to say its propecia and that's it, You have to ask yourself is your hair worth the risk?? In my case yes it is! I don't know what i'd do without my hair but its up to you

 

[Rottingman]

Thanks for the reply massa. Yeah I know about a higher dose only doing very little for dht suppresion but Bernstein said some patients for whatever reason don't respond to the 1mg of propecia may have better luck with the 2.5 mg of finasteride. I know it's not much of a comparison but when I was taking lexapro 10 mg felt more or less like a sugar pill but when I bumped it up to 20mg is when the medication actually started feeling like it was taking affect. Yea my hair is def worth the risk but if I can still see results without the risk that would be optimal! Perhaps I should start with the 2.5 mg of finasteride for a few months and see how that goes??? Worst comes to worst I can switch to the avodart then.

 

[Jls008]

I went to Bernstein and had the same experience. He spent about 10 minutes with me and told me to increase the proscar to 2.5 mg per day for diffuse thinning. Seemed rushed and disinterested. After about a year still losing ground.

 

[Rottingman]

ugh that's discouraging. So the additional dose basically did nothing? Have you considered avodart?? Yeah the whole trip was such a waste! He basically used the hair magnifying tool for ten seconds! The only thing good to come out of it was the script for 5mg proscar and that could end up being a waste too.

 

[ham373]

Finasteride inhibits as much DHT (about 70%) if taken daily at doses from 0.05 mg to up to 50mg.
There is likely to be some individual variation in response but people shouldn't need more than 0.2mg/day to inhibit DHT as much as finasteride is capable of doing.
So 2.5 mg of finasteride seems like a lot.

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You can see from this graph that Dutasteride (dutasteride) at 0.5mg does inhibit more DHT than finasteride (finasteride, used in this study at 1mg).

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Here is a graph that shows increasing doses of finasteride from 0.04 mg up to 1mg during 14 days of daily dosing. You can see by 14 days of dosing they have almost all reached the limit for finasteride (about 70% inhibition of baseline DHT)

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Perhaps even more interestingly, even doses of 100mg(!) a day hardly inhibited DHT more than 1mg a day (or not much more than 0.04 mg a day)


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That is, 50mg/day of finasteride reduced DHT from a baseline of about 2.0 to 0.6. (A decrease of (2.0-0.6)/2.0*100%=70%)
1mg/day reduced DHT to around 0.6 as well (from the graph above).
So did 0.2mg/day.
And even little old 0.12mg/day and 0.04mg/day look like if you kept dosing would get down to or pretty close down to 0.6 for DHT.

All this is a long way of saying I don't think taking 2.5mg of proscar is a good idea because there is no reason to think it will make a difference to your hair if 1mg didn't.
However, it is also probably true to say that there wouldn't be any more side effects to 2.5mg/day versus 1mg/day of finasteride for the same reasons.

 

[Rottingman]

Thanks for the response man and I understand what you're saying. That being said I'm going to give the 2.5 mg finasteride a trial run till about june or so. If things keep looking bleak then i'm going to jump on avodart and not look back. Keep in mind back when I was using finasteride I was binge drinking about 15 beers a night and my diet was total ****. I was taking the finasteride in the evening during my drinking so I have a feeling all that garbage may have made it less effective.