Bryan said:
The reason I was cautious in my statement is that we still can't be sure of the extent to which other androgens (besides DHT) are involved in balding. There's little doubt in my mind that they ARE involved, but how big a role do they play? Just a tiny, insignificant one? A medium-level one? A big one? Until we can get a better answer for that question, and a better idea of what the "threshold" level of DHT is that starts to damage hair follicles significantly, we probably won't know for sure just how much better it is to go from an ~85% inhibition to a 99% inhibition of the type 2 enzyme.
Edit: And yet another confounding variable is my little pet-theory about how at least part of the long-term (5-year) haircount declines in the Propecia study was a result of age-related deterioration, not the remaining DHT per se. What if that theory is actually CORRECT? That would imply that even dutasteride, with its nearly complete DHT suppression, would still experience a certain amount of long-term decline, too. There are just too many variables here to answer your question with any great degree of confidence, but I think it's safe to say that dutasteride will provide _some_ improvement in maintenance.
Bryan
Gotcha. What other androgens are at play besides testosterone? I know that plain old test is, but doesn't DHT have 30 times the affinity for the androgen receptor that test does? So when you're knocking 99% out, and even if all the remaining gets converted to test, it seems pretty meaningless.
I hear your age-related decline theory and have thought about it, but if that's all it is, and it's not related to genetics and DHT, then why do some guys without male pattern baldness just get their mature Norwood-2 hairline and never go further than that? Is it because of the conventional wisdom that their androgen receptors aren't genetically sensitive to DHT like those of men with a history of male pattern baldness in their family? If that's the reason, then wouldn't knocking 99% of DHT out, even with the remaining testosterone mean that most men on dutasteride would mirror those non-male pattern baldness men?
Because when you're talking about age-related decline, Bryan, there are men like my grandpa. He's 82 years old and he's about an NW3, but he was an NW2 until his seventies. So he clearly has a mild case of male pattern baldness because anything beyond NW2(maturation of the hairline that happens to 95% of Caucasian males) is technically male pattern baldness. But there are caucasian guys out there who never get worse than NW2 and there are even some caucasian and non-caucasian men who never even lose their juvenile hairline and stay at NW1 or close to it their entire lives.
Basically, what I'm saying to you is this age-related thinning that we've discussed is actually male pattern baldness in most cases, although milder than the typical male pattern baldness that we see on here. That whole stat about how 40% of men in their forties show signs of male pattern baldness, 50% of men in their fifties, and 80% of men in their eighties, etc. Anything beyond the slight recession of the temples that creates the mature hairline is technically male pattern baldness, so it's not just age-related thinning.
And if it is just that slight age-related thinning- are you just referring to hairline maturation?- then it's pretty insignificant relative to male pattern baldness.
Sorry for the convoluted post. :hairy:
