Has Anyone Found A Way To Prolong The Effects Of finasteride Or dutasteride

[champpy]

I've been on finasteride about five years also jumped on dutasteride over the last two years.
I feel that they have helped slow down the regression to where I still have about 50 to 60% left today but over the past few months really start to thin quickly.
Does anybody have any way or know anyone who's had success getting finasteride or dutasteride to kind of Kickstart and refresh their functions like when we first started using them. Their effects are definitely waning when I use them. Really wish there was a way to give these drugs a Re-Boost, so that they can work their magic again.

I've considered going without them for a while so the my body doesn't have the resistence to the two medicines but in the meantime while I'm waiting I'll be losing a lot more hair.
Any ideas on how to re boost finasteride and dutasteride

 

[MomoGee]

I think some people claimed succces using finasteride daily but using dutasteride once a week as well. It's eorth a shot

 

[WMQ]

There is no way.

finasteride and dutasteride lose their effects because of chronic androgen receptor upregulation. To desensitize your follicles of androgens and reboot their response to treatments you need to knock off ARs off, which is impossible as of now. It basically equals to a cure for hair loss.

 

[Roberto_72]

How old are you?
In my opinion of a person who has been balding for almost thirty years now, I can tell you that the "new" thinning might be due to at least two factors:
- finasteride losing effect on you
- your body changing and producing more DHT than finasteride can handle.

It has happened to me immediately after 40. My hair was decimated in a few months and I was not on fina. It must have been some hormonal change that the body decided to give me...

So why do you not test your DHT?

 

[GoldenMane]

Nobody knows why this happens.

The main theories are

A. Upregulation of androgen receptors. This is a homeostatic response to a reduction of androgens due to finasteride.

B. The cumulative effect of a lifetime of DHT exposure reaching a certain damage threshold. Hay fever works a bit like that.

I doubt that it's the former. DHT doesn't reduce your overall androgens. It raises your testosterone in an equal amount that it lowers your DHT. Testosterone does have a lower affinity for ARs though.

For now we can only speculate. I believe there are drugs capable of AR downregulation though, if you believe upregulation is the cause. A quick search on google scholar might give you some leads.

 

[champpy]

I think some people claimed succces using finasteride daily but using dutasteride once a week as well. It's eorth a shot

Damn. Im already on finasteride and dutasteride daily, so im prob screwed

 

[champpy]

How old are you?
In my opinion of a person who has been balding for almost thirty years now, I can tell you that the "new" thinning might be due to at least two factors:
- finasteride losing effect on you
- your body changing and producing more DHT than finasteride can handle.

It has happened to me immediately after 40. My hair was decimated in a few months and I was not on fina. It must have been some hormonal change that the body decided to give me...

So why do you not test your DHT?

Im 41 now and yes, it began right around my 40th bday! It was like a switch was flipped. And i was on both finasteride and dutasteride at the time too.
I never had my levels checked, but im not sure what difference it would make if im optionless at this point

 

[Grasshüpfer]

I would do a hormone test. Either you find something out of order or we all at least know that it's upregulation.

You can also try ru, seti, licl and dermarolling. The Hellouser regimen. I'm not saying it will work but Hellouser's Androgenetic Alopecia is also quite severe and he seems to maintain.

Might as well stop on it's own because it was just a push.

 

[Roberto_72]

Im 41 now and yes, it began right around my 40th bday! It was like a switch was flipped. And i was on both finasteride and dutasteride at the time too.
I never had my levels checked, but im not sure what difference it would make if im optionless at this point

For instance if your DHT is on the higher range, you may want to go to 5 mg finasteride?

Apart from that, I have a strong feeling that middle age gives you a new wave of hormones or enzymes that transform testosterone to DHT.

 

[KO1]

People say they lose effectiveness, but I've seen very few cases where there was significant hair loss while on finasteride. And even that hair loss is in the front where it is least effective.

 

[Swiss_Tampons]

Nobody knows why this happens.

The main theories are

A. Upregulation of androgen receptors. This is a homeostatic response to a reduction of androgens due to finasteride.

B. The cumulative effect of a lifetime of DHT exposure reaching a certain damage threshold. Hay fever works a bit like that.

@InBeforeTheCure, resuming the cumulative damage vs switch paradigms discussion of some weeks ago, can I ask for your opinion on this topic?

 

[GoldenMane]

@InBeforeTheCure, resuming the cumulative damage vs switch paradigms discussion of some weeks ago, can I ask for your opinion on this topic?

I don't think it's upregulation, simply because overall androgens are not reduced when I'm finasteride/dutasteride. You still have all that testosterone floating around, more actually since less is converting to DHT. And that testosterone is still Interacung with androgen receptors so I don't see why they would upregulation.

That said, testosterone does have a lower affinity for ARs than DHT so I could be wrong. I won't rule out upregulation but we should question it.
We really need to know whether we should stagger our finasteride/dutasteride treatments or use the big guns as early as possible.

I just don't know.

 

[champpy]

For instance if your DHT is on the higher range, you may want to go to 5 mg finasteride?

Apart from that, I have a strong feeling that middle age gives you a new wave of hormones or enzymes that transform testosterone to DHT.

Roberto, do i just go to my family doctor and ask for a regular blood test to get DHT levels, or is it some specialized test i should ask for?

Now that i think about it, i believe a couple years ago i tried to up my dosage to see if it would spur new growth. It didnt, so i went back to a lower dosage. I wonder if that might have caused some of the loss ive had the past cpl yrs...

 

[mr_robot]

Roberto, do i just go to my family doctor and ask for a regular blood test to get DHT levels, or is it some specialized test i should ask for?

Now that i think about it, i believe a couple years ago i tried to up my dosage to see if it would spur new growth. It didnt, so i went back to a lower dosage. I wonder if that might have caused some of the loss ive had the past cpl yrs...

Any regrowth from finasteride or dutasteride is not due to follicles recovering due to DHT inhibition but most likely from the increase in serum estrogen which is great for hair, but also great for developing gyno.

 

[inham123]

Do we have any studies on efficacy after 15-20 years? Like KO1 all that if read about from both users and from 10 year efficacy studies, Finasteride will maintain extremely well with 95% not having any noticeable loss after 10 years. But I'm really curious about people who have taken it since its introduction in 1997 until now. Or someone taking Proscar since 1992 (more unlikely).

An interesting property is the regrowth that lasts for 2 year average over baseline..then in year 10 after starting that regrowth disappears so after year 10 you're back to baseline. Considering the regrowth (that you will very gradually lose) was only there due to Finasteride it seems to me that it should keep working very well for the rest of your life. And then you can also start taking Dusteride which seems to be quite a bit more effective than Finasteride in regrowth.

 

[InBeforeTheCure]

@InBeforeTheCure, resuming the cumulative damage vs switch paradigms discussion of some weeks ago, can I ask for your opinion on this topic?

AR upregulation in response to androgen deprivation implies a negative feedback loop (i.e. activated AR represses its own expression). Such a negative feedback loop has been described in prostate cancer cells (Cai et al.). However, I've looked through time-series microarray data from Chew et al. (GSE66664) which tracks changes in gene expression in DHT-treated dermal papilla cells (from balding and non-balding scalp) over 48 hours, and there wasn't much change in AR expression at least on the mRNA level. Whether there would be a change over a longer period of time I don't know, but that would be a different mechanism than the direct mechanism that Cai et al. described.

We should also acknowledge that the etiology of A.G.A is mostly unknown, involving several dozen genes at least, very few of which have a known connection to A.G.A. Consequently then, what determines sensitivity of hair follicles to DHT is a large and complex regulatory network that we mostly don't understand.

 

[GoldenMane]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16648561/

Selenium induced androgen receptor down regulation?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/10773882/

Tea polyphenols?

 

[champpy]

Good finds!
So selenium and green tea may help? Let me stress the "may" part

 

[GoldenMane]

No idea, but down regulation would be an interesting avenue to look at, even as a preventative measure. Didn't read the papers, just skimmed the abstracts. I assume that they would result in general down regulations throughout your body if effective, not just hair follicles, so it may impact muscle mass.
If nothing else, polyphenols, eating some Brazil nuts and fish won't hurt

 

[supermusic]

I increased the finasteride dose to 5mg daily and I notice some improvements again after two months of use.I still apply minoxidil daily.Not sides at the moment.