Try a Combo attack
I took finasteride for about 7-8 years and then the effects on the hair decreased. Don't forget finasteride never stops working its just that after giving you an initial growth burst, over time it acts more to keep you ahead (way ahead) of your natural loss curve than grow more hair.
I wrestled with the dutasteride idea for a while and was nervous about it, but in the end I realized that to many guys (including me and many on this board) feeling that your hair is OK or holding well makes life a HELL of a lot better. Since some people jump out of planes to be happy or join dangerous jobs such as fire/police, I say go for a little risk to be happy it if that is what you want. Also to be fair don't forget all the people taking dutasteride at 5 times the hair dose for their prostate for the last 5 years or so. No major meltdowns yet that have come to light.
So I switched to dutasteride 0.5 per day for four months and it worked great, but sides kicked in (sucked!!)
I recommend a compromise that eventually worked for me (even though I can't explain why). It took me a long time to find the best way for me. dutasteride 0.5 every third day was quite good for two years, but I found something a little better that gave me the best effect on hair (mainly thickness and weight rather than actually a lot more hairs). That method is a combo attack.
I liked finasteride because it had no sides for me. dutasteride worked great but at 0.5 per day caused me hormone tinkering sides (BAD: bloating , flushing- no boobs and GOOD: hornier and stronger in the gym -bench from 285 to 315 in a month).
So now I do finasteride 1.25 a day for old times sake and cause it works to some degree and one dutasteride 2 or 3 times a week as a booster. That is like finasteride 1.25 per day and dutasteride apprx 0.2 mg per day (on average). A combo attack.
For those who say it makes no sense as the two meds do the same in effect, I say that having taken them they metabolize differently and do slightly different things to hormones as well as DHT (and the obvious fact that dutasteride blocks the other form of DHT). Anyway, lets be real, there are very few definite answers yet and who would have guessed that dutasteride would make me stronger and hornier (TEST boost most likely). What is nice is that the finasteride dose seems to counteract (for me) some of the dutasteride bad sides as well and the dutasteride counters any finasteride neg sex effects.
I have no idea why, but perhaps finasteride's tinkering with hormones and dutasteride's are different and they offset each other. Last point, you won't know till you try yourself how anything works for you. With all due respect to the pundits and predictors, unless you have done it all (finasteride, dutasteride every day, dutasteride every other day, finasteride + dutasteride) you can never accurately guess the results for yourself. I figure better to tinker a little with these things that WORK than to sprinkle ten different peptides and dung extracts in a paste of arginine and ground up dutasteride pills on your mellon at night.
