Copper Peptide Dependancy

[htownballa]

Ok 2 questions:

1) Does hair build up a dependency to copper peptides such as Folligen/Tricomin like it does to Propecia and minoxidil...ie will you lose your hair FAST after you suspend the treatment?

2) I just begun my battle with male pattern baldness. 24 yrs old with major thinning in front NW2. Just went on Propecia, thinking about adding CPs to it and seeing what results I get in a year. Then adding minoxidil. Good or Bad plan?

Thx

 

[CCS]

edited.

I no longer believe propecia can maintain any minoxidil hair.

minoxidil is strictly additive and does not stop balding. It might protect blood vessels a bit, but does not fight balding at all.

SODs actually repair hair, I think, so propecia can maintain growth.

 

[htownballa]

College, I have heard from most other sources that hair grown with minoxidil, etc CANNOT be maintained with Propecia. Where is your information coming from. I'm not saying you are wrong, just curious.

 

[CCS]

it is just comming from my own intution. not from anything I read. i guess i should add that to my signature.


I'm not saying you hair won't shorten when you stop rogaine. I'm just saying that any hair that actually was repaired by minoxidil could be kept by propecia, though some of the weakest ones may need both to survive.

some people on here think that some hairs are minoxidil dependent, others strictly propecia dependent, and maybe some are both.

i say all are just dependent on protection, and that both contribute to that protection to different degrees, and that some of the hairs regrown by minoxidil just look terminal because they are made longer, but many of them are still only intermediate and perhaps too weak to be kept alive with propecia alone. I think

 

[Felk]

Unfortunately, however, there is a published medical study showing hair grown from minoxidil cannot be maintained with propecia. Do a pubmed search, its one of the many involving both drugs.

Makes sense though, since they both regrow hair in completely different ways.

As to the original question, if you get decent regrowth from a copper peptide alone, you will most likely have to keep using it. However it's the best regrowth to have i'd say, as it could possibly be kept up with occasional use of cps.

 

[CCS]

edited.

I no longer believe propecia can maintain any minoxidil hair.

minoxidil is strictly additive and does not stop balding. It might protect blood vessels a bit, but does not fight balding at all.

SODs actually repair hair, I think, so propecia can maintain growth.

-------------------
original post

rogain can make intermediate hairs look terminal, when their anagen phase has just been lengthened. I'm not saying propecia will keep the anagen phase lengthened like that, so getting off rogaine can cause hairs to grow to shorter lengths if they were not fully terminal to begin with. Also, propecia is better at maintaining terminal hairs than intermediate hairs. I'm saying that if you fully repair all hairs with topicals so that they accually are terminal, and minoxidil is lengthening their anagen phase from 2 years to 4 years and not 2 months to 1 year so that they just look terminal, propecia can maintain the hair. i am not saying that you can keep all the density and length of rogaines magnification just by using propecia. i never meant that.

people respond better to propecia if they have more hair when they start. If everyone just maintained their hair, that claim would not be valid, since thin people would have the same results as nearly thick haired people. it follows that time and genetics are not the only factors determining whether a follicle will respond well to propecia. If they were the only factors, then men who started 5 years later would catch up to genetically similar men who started early, which does not happen.

therefore, if you regrow you hair with topicals, by whatever mechanism, those follicles will then respond to propecia better than they would have in their miniturized state. But it has to be actual regrowth, and not just thin hairs getting longer from staying in anagen longer.

i believe that if one guy uses propecia from day one for 5 years, and his identical twin starts 3 years after him and is balder then and uses super topicals to regrow all his hair and pass his brother (who is thinning a little like in my avator) and reach the state where his brother at his best, and then gets off the topicals and uses propecia only, he will loose hair from there faster than his brother, and will slowly get down to exactly where his brother is at year 5 or 6 or later, however long it takes them to converge. he will not fall down to as far as he would have been had he just used propecia from year 3 onwards and never used the topicals.

 

[CCS]

to anyone who did not want read all that, i will summarize:


If you regrow a lot of hair with topicals to an amount greater than what you had before you started treatment, and then get on propecia and drop the topicals, the amount of hair you will have after any sudden changes will eventually be equal to the amount you would have now had you started propecia back when you had as much hair as the topicals gave you and only used propecia and no topicals, except any vellus hair that just looks terminal due to minoxidil's anagen lengthening will shorten and show their true health level.

Summarized further, topicals can turn back the clock and let you start propecia years earlier, but propecia can't keep all that new hair any more than it can keep all your hair if you had started earlier, since the average guy loses hair again after 2 years.

 

[CCS]

Felk, I'm not convinced minoxidil does regrow much REAL hair. So that is why I don't credit the study much. I think minoxidil does do repair work and protect veins, and is a good stimulate and synergistic with CP's, but I think it mostly just lengthens dying hairs by increasing their anagen phase, making them look terminal when they are not. I think propecia does maintain any actual hair that was really repaired, but it will not keep the vellus hairs in the anagen phase. If the study classified hairs as terminal, that is just a classification, probably based on their length. 30mm is the usual criteria.

If you max out with propecia and rogaine and then switch to just propecia, your hair will not look as full. I am not denying that nor every have, though I probably did not fully elaborate before.

 

[htownballa]

Collegechem, ur theory definitely makes sense, but I'm too scared too experiment. Once I try the minoxidil, im stickin too it, unless of course side effects, no improvement etc

 

[techprof]

college, not to burst your bubble.
Dr. Proctor advises that if we use minoxidil 5% and move to proxiphen (which has sods, nano, spironolactone, minoxidil etc) he recommends using minoxidil 5% once a day to hold on to the hairs which are dependent on minoxidil 5%.

So my guess is that minoxidil dependent hairs will be lost if you stop it. The reason is perhaps we still don't know how minoxidil works.

 

[CCS]

sounds good.

if you come off the topicals, you WILL loose hair.



i'm wondering what the difference is between a hair that normally is a vellus hair but is "minoxidil dependent" and now is at terminal length.

Castrated men don't go bald, if they were not balding at the time they were castrated. Or does that only seem true because of small sample size?

So if we inhibit 100% of DHT in a minoxidil dependent hair, it should live without the minoxidil, if it is actually a terminal hair. But if it is just an overgrown vellus hair, it will stop growing in the abscence of minoxidil, and grow back small again in its next cycle. In contrast, a fully recovered hair stays keeps growing to full length. In that semantic, many terminal hairs are minoxidil dependent.

I would not consider them terminal, though they are by cosmetic standards. Since only the vellus hairs behave this way, all these dependent hairs are just hairs that would not be there had you not got on minoxidil in the first place. So people take no risk by getting on minoxidil.
Minoxidil is like putting Topik in your hair. I think it also has a small repairing benifit that is synergistic with SODs.

i wonder if minoxidil dependent hairs enter catagen when they lose their supply, or if they just enter catagen normally, and just don't grow back nearly as big, and that gives the appearance of a shed. probably the former. That then makes me wonder if true terminal hairs stay in anagen longer due to minoxidil, and if they shed when deprived. If they do, and least they should still be terminal when they come back. They just would a 2-3 year regular terminal instead of a 5+ year super terminal.

I need to go back to my other posts and make sure they are up to this current model. damn. that's a lot of posts.

 

[CCS]

yeah, I think i'll stop giving advice for a while and just think this over.

most people loose the effects of minoxidil after 5 years, or so i've read from people on this forum. is that because the people's hair would have died in that time anyway, and minoxidil was just multiplying the length this whole time, or is that because these people were not taking finasteride at the same time, and could have maintained this length? or did these people just have bad results?

in my case, minoxidil starts showing effects after 2 months. maybe it gets better after that. i don't know.

 

[htownballa]

college did minoxidil have a big improvement in ur hair? or did u have better results with the finasteride

 

[CCS]

I started finasteride before minoxidil. finasteride just maintained my hair. combining them grew 3/4 inch fuzz in my left hair line, out of slick scalp 1/2 inch below the other hairs. i was not consistent, got off it for a month, and the fuzz disapeared. i got on and off 3 times like this and it always came back in 2 months. i'm trying to do minoxidil now, but with my other topicals i usually just get it once a day. i am seeing some small fuzz coming back.

 

[Bryan]

I'm not saying you hair won't shorten when you stop rogaine. I'm just saying that any hair that actually was repaired by minoxidil could be kept by propecia, though some of the weakest ones may need both to survive.

Here's a scan of two short but interesting studies that were published together in a dermatology journal:

http://www.geocities.com/bryan50001/finasteride-minoxidil.htm

The first one is titled "Minoxidil vs Finasteride in the Treatment of Men With Androgenetic Alopecia". If you look at the data in the graph carefully, you'll probably notice that there's a major inconsistency with what they say in the text! I actually emailed one of the authors about that, and I did in fact hear back from him! :wink:

The second study is titled "Finasteride Treatment May Not Prevent Telogen Effluvium After Minoxidil Withdrawal". It's a case study of a patient who went downhill after dropping minoxidil, even though he continued using finasteride. I think it's pretty clear from that and numerous anecdotal reports over the years on various hairloss sites that it really is true that finasteride alone may not be able to retain hair grown by minoxidil.

Bryan

 

[Bryan]

Castrated men don't go bald, if they were not balding at the time they were castrated. Or does that only seem true because of small sample size?

And if they WERE balding at the time of castration, further balding was arrested. That's according to Hamilton, who examined that issue rather closely.

So if we inhibit 100% of DHT in a minoxidil dependent hair, it should live without the minoxidil, if it is actually a terminal hair. But if it is just an overgrown vellus hair, it will stop growing in the abscence of minoxidil, and grow back small again in its next cycle.

Are you hinting or suggesting that hairs change only from one cycle to the next?

most people loose the effects of minoxidil after 5 years, or so i've read from people on this forum. is that because the people's hair would have died in that time anyway, and minoxidil was just multiplying the length this whole time, or is that because these people were not taking finasteride at the same time, and could have maintained this length? or did these people just have bad results?

Well, I'm not sure what the difference is between the first and second theories you list, because they seem pretty much the same to me!

In any event, I think they are correct. My feeling is that minoxidil provides that legendary offset of growth which I've talked about so much. It provides that offset as long as you continue to use minoxidil, but it doesn't really interfere with the fundamental balding process. So when you still gradually go bald (if you're not using Propecia or something similar at the same time), it's not because the minoxidil is "losing effect", it's because the balding process is catching up with the minoxidil. For permanent results (more or less), use minoxidil WITH an antiandrogenic type of treatment.

Bryan

 

[powersam]

i'm afraid i cant find it right now, but someone (bryan?) posted a graph of hair counts through a long period of minoxidil use and after quitting. apparently after stopping minoxidil you lose a hell of a lot of hair, but once you rebound after the initial shed, your hair counts will come up to basically the same level as those who had never used minoxidil at all. i'll try harder to find the graph.

 

[Bryan]

Here it is:

http://www.geocities.com/bryan50001/quitting-minoxidil.htm

Bryan

 

[Felk]

That graph is one of the tihngs that convinced me to start minoxidil, actually. Knowing that the "mother of all sheds" you get once quitting eventually returns to normal, is comforting i must say.

 

[CCS]

there is not a big difference between the 5% and the 2%. I wonder if 5% once a day is as good as 2% twice a day. Looks like minoxidil gives a 30% improvement in hair count and mass, which I guess is worth the hassel.



and bryan, as for my implying the hairs change cycle to cycle, they won't shrink in the middle of anagen. not possible. they can grow slower, or get thinner at the base, or according to that graph, fall out, and the new hair grows in smaller. so because the timing of the cycle depends on the minoxidil, the hair does change from that cycle to the next. if the hair did not fall out, it would change within the cycle, agreed.