minoxidil app ears to only work for a select number of years.
Show me a 20-years' study that demonstrates this! Of course, there is none. All you have at your disposal are hysterical posts from internet forums. The internet is flooded by such stupid myths and one wonders, where they actually come from.
When I started with my anti-hairloss therapy in 1996, I naturally supposed that if the treatment works, and if it always suppresses the same stimulus, it can never stop working and as long as I will use it regularly, it will work indefinitely. And it has been working for nearly 16 years with the same efficiacy, as I predicted. And go figure: I have never regrown any solid hair on 2-5% minoxidil. But as a maintenance drug, it was very reliable, and it protected my hair even during steroid cycles with Winstrol.
Therefore, when I hear that someone regrew hair on minoxidil, yet after several years it somehow started to disappear, and his hairloss progressed again, I can't grasp it. There are only two possibilities that come on my mind: 1/ He was undisciplined and stopped using it regularly, 2/ He was a hyperandrogenic young man, whose hormones were getting out of control.
Actually, long-term studies on finasteride identified groups that were at high risk, as for the continuing progression of male pattern baldness: Young males, who started to lose hair very early, and those with an advanced Norwood stage. In older men and men with Norwood2 stage, this probability was quite negligible. Therefore, young men with an advanced stage of baldness would have a hard time to stop male pattern baldness. And if you read the post on internet forums, you can identify exactly this group of men, who report the highest failure rate: They started to get bald around the age of 20, did nothing for several years, and as late as they observed their balding vertex, they finally started to look for help and whine on internet forums. Some of them even posted their hormonal profile and it shows insane numbers like total testosterone around 1000 ng/dl, and DHT around 100 ng/dl. Naturally, these guys can't expect that they would have success with finasteride, because it will only lower their DHT on the level of average adult men, and their testosterone levels will explode like in a body-builder on moderate doses of steroids.
And as for minoxidil, one must consider that the officially approved concentrations (2-5%) are still only experimental, sub-optimal for many people, and don't have the same efficiacy like finasteride. This can easily explain the number of people, who failed with minoxidil. But after my experience, I can say that minoxidil works in a similar way like finasteride, i.e. there are large individual differences. In the early long-term studies from late 80's, about one-third of men on 2-3% minoxidil continued to regrow hair even after 4-5 years, while some were losing hair despite minoxidil use. We get the same picture with finasteride: According to Rossi et al. (2011), 14% men worsened during the 10 years of therapy, 65% maintained their hair, and 21% further improved even after 5 years.
I really don't buy the bull**** that minoxidil works only "for a select number of years". It's just nonsense. Why the hell should it stop working, when it has enough strength to even regrow lost hair? When it regrows hair in people, who have been balding for 1-2 decades, logics says that it can be effective even after 1-2 decades, irrespectively of if these men are balding without minoxidil or using minoxidil. And indeed, there are people, who have been on minoxidil for 20-25 years already! And I belive that the combination of finasteride with minoxidil should guarantee a virtually indefinite success for 90+% men. In any case, if you pass your 30th birthday, you should already be fine, because androgen levels in your body will decrease, and the probability of further hairloss is low.
I sincerely believe that the picture that we see on this and other internet forums is heavily distorted, and I wouldn't recommend visiting such forums to anybody, who is seriously looking for help, because he will only be depressed by unsubstantied claims of whining, defeatist losers with a lack of determination and discipline. Recently, I even saw posts of guys, who were still losing hair on dutasteride + minoxidil. Do you think that such individuals could be representative? And that you should start to worry about the future of your fight against hairloss? I would say that they are genetic oddballs, whose incidence in the population is 0.1%. The disproportionate accumulation of such oddballs in the internet perversely skews the real efficiacy of current treatments.
