Caerus's story

[Caerus]

Hey everyone, I thought I would register here and maybe get some help and conversation. This is a pretty general overview of my situation.

Right now I am 21 years old and something like a Norwood 2.5 but also losing density on the top to the back, in addition to the hairline. I started noticing a loss when I was about 16 and its shed in spaced-out waves since then. On one side of my family baldness is pretty common (maybe about 3/4 men), although not usually until at least over the age of 35. On the other side it exists but in around 1/5 men.

I'm a very ascetic person but losing hair at this age has been extremely painful. If I were 30 or over I'm not sure I would care at all, but being that I already look quite a bit older than my age because of a lifetime of huge sleep problems and severe stress, its socially crippling to be losing my hair so young.

I have been on finasteride for about 2 years, and I think it slowed it down but it is definitely not stopping it at all. I'm wondering where I should start if say a year from now I want to at least have not lost any more hair than I have at the moment. I'm not doing any other treatments aside from finasteride, so any advice would be great. I'm going to go into the doctor in the next two weeks to talk about it and maybe I can learn some things from here to ask him about.

Thanks for any comments or tips.

C

 

[lilltoolate]

Minoxidil is your best bet if you want to get some regrowth. Minoxidil and finasteride is a good combination for hairloss treatment

 

[flimflam]

have you looked into switching finasteride for dutasteride?

 

[Caerus]

I don't really know much about it, but I thought it was just really similar to finasteride. I should read up on it, but does it offer something finasteride doesn't, whats the deal?

 

[Stu85]

Caerus, from what I hear, dutasteride does what finasteride does - block the evil DHT - but it does it a lot better. Whereas finasteride blacks about 80% (someone correct me if I'm wrong) dutasteride blocks about 98.5% of DHT.

It gets better regrowth and I guess it probably maintains what you have for a lot longer too. But as it's fairly new, no one is that sure what it's long term effects are. Oh, and you're probably more likely to witness side-effects, but I reckon if you've been on finasteride for two years without incident, then you're probably gonna be fine on dutasteride as well.

 

[dietcola]

cut hair short, apply minoxidil twice a day.

 

[Caerus]

Caerus, from what I hear, dutasteride does what finasteride does - block the evil DHT - but it does it a lot better. Whereas finasteride blacks about 80% (someone correct me if I'm wrong) dutasteride blocks about 98.5% of DHT.

It gets better regrowth and I guess it probably maintains what you have for a lot longer too. But as it's fairly new, no one is that sure what it's long term effects are. Oh, and you're probably more likely to witness side-effects, but I reckon if you've been on finasteride for two years without incident, then you're probably gonna be fine on dutasteride as well.

Oh ok, thanks stu. I'll talk to the doctor about it or something. 98.5% sounds like a whole bunch. I havn't had any side effects whatsoever on finasteride, but it also hasn't been extremely effective at keeping the hairline so I don't know how far 18% will go if I even get that much. Definitly worth a shot though.

I haven't taken minoxidil at all, I should look into that too. Can it be ordered online or anything?