A theory on antiangrogens loss of effectiveness

[DarkVctry]

Okay its been reported by members on these boards that after a certain time of use of drugs such as finasteride; the effects start to slow down. This is what ive been reading about with just about all the drugs.

So my question is, what if i slowly tapered off on the finasteride by keep lowering the dosage.....and while doing that slowly switch to another drug like, fluridil+spironolactone, and do that for about 4 months, then go right back to the finasteride. (pretty much what im describing is a bodybuilding term of what we call "cycling")

Would this theory work ? It works for steroid users. Pretty much make your main attack drug of choice your main, then slowly taper off with your post cycle stack drugs like your, minoxidil, saw palmetto, hair signals, spironolactone, RU58841, fluridil.

Maby im just thinking too hard.......but Id imagine if the receptors started to build a tolerance to a drug, then you take the drug off for a few months......that the drug would become potent once re-introduced.

Anybody else have thoughts on that ??

 

[nickypoos]

I think the lack of finasteride will have an adverse effect on the 'off-cycles'. I think the best thing to do if you suspect lack of effectivness is just to keep throwing topicals into the reigieme. I believe the progression will still be very very slow and easilly haulted with topicals, as i don't believe topicals alone will hold it.

 

[DarkVctry]

Well i agree with you, but so many people report that after 6-10 years the finasteride starts to "wear off". I assume this is because the body builds a tolerance ? I have no clue since im not a biochemist, but Id image if at that time you can tell its no longer potent against you're hairloss.....then you move to topicals for a few months, then switch back to finasteride ?

I don't know im honestly asking this because im about to shell out alot of money for this RU58841, and Id be scared as hell if that stuff ever losses its powerful punch.

 

[abcdefg]

Believe me Merk has biochemists working for them and I doubt they could you tell why propecia loses effectiveness with any certainty.

 

[theShade]

It's an interesting question - of why exactly the body 'builds a tolerance'. I would rather assume, that it is not the body as such - as much as a more local reason - such as the scalp region or hair follicles themselves - where conditions simply progress past the point where 5-alpha reductase inhibitors would be effective.

I mean, if you consider the catch-up loss that happens when you stop taking finasteride; essentially 5-6 years worth of balding can take place within the space of a few months. How can this be possible? This suggests that it's not so much a continous process, whereby the androgens continously bash-away at the follicles and they gradually become too weak to support hair, but rather that's it's more of a threshold. If it was a continous process - then even stopping finasteride would mean that you would have still 'added to' the lifespan of the hair while you were on it, and that it would still take a good few years for the DHT to waste away the hair follicles now that it can work to full effect again.

A 'threshold' would mean however, that simply after a certain age, when a certain level of androgens have been reached - the hair will simply fall out - and that the 'slow balding process' as would otherwise be observed without the use of finasteride, is not a continous and cumulative process of damage towards the follicles. This is in fact simply an illusion, an observation brought around by the fact that DHT levels or the follicles sensitivity to it increases only slowly.

Now of course the mechanism by which this happens seems to be a mystery, but the implication is that it is very much encoded genetically within biochemistry of the hair follicles or scalp region itself, rather than in the wider-body. It's sort of hard to express what I'm trying to get at here.

If it was the body as a whole that was responsible for building a tolerance to finasteride, I suspect that we would be able to observe more systemic effects, than simply those observed on the scalp, and explaining the 'catch-up loss' might prove a little trickier.

 

[TheGrayMan2001]

The simplest answer is the most likely to be correct. Your hair simply has a great chance of becoming more sensitive to minor amounts of DHT as you get older. For people destined to be a NW6-7 at age 25 or 30, they are probably going to lose hair no matter how much finasteride or dutasteride they take.

Sometimes the genes are going to win out no matter what we do.