irishpride86,
Your hairloss sounds similar to mine...
Dude, your hair is not that bad at all. The good thing is that you have hair all over your head, so after using the right medications your head could fill in quite nicely.
I have been 8 months on propecia and 3 months on topical anti-androgens.
i am a very good responder to those anti-androgen drugs.
The concept that a hair has to always shed in order to let a new hair grow thicker is wrong. The same hair can also thicken right away, without shedding.
And at the non-male pattern baldness growth speed you should be able to feel and notice a thicker hair shaft base in as soon as one or 2 weeks if the drugs are very effective.
the flaws i see in your regimen is that it does not address the issue of testosterone directly binding to the androgen receptors.
finasteride increases test. to about 120%, and 1 finasteride a day reduces scalp DHT by only 38%, which leaves still plenty enough of DHT to affect hair.
finasteride has 5 times the binding affinity of Testosterone, but if you end up with a lot of testosterone and little DHT, guess what will happen..testosterone will affect your hair.
you need to look into topicals that address testosterone binding, as well as blocking the left over (62% ?) of DHT to achieve a near-complete inhibition of androgens.
the best and safest drug out there is fluridil (Eucapil). this will inhibit the androgen receptors themselves, therefore you dont need to further lower your DHT levels, a hormone which is needed in our body for other purposes (libido etc..)
a few other drugs are called androgen-antagonists, meaning that they will bind to the androgen receptors to block it and prevent DHT or Test. to bind.
those are the Ru58841 and topical Flutamide, and Spiroloactone. Ru is very expensive and hard to obtain. flutamide is cheap but has side effects. spironolactone is a weak androgen antagonist but might work. i never used RU but i used the other drugs mentionned in my post.
Ok so now you wanna use minoxidil 2x a day to regrow. Well, your starting to grow new hair with minoxidil, but at the same time, u are not fighting with DHT and androgens as the new hairs continues to grow through their cycles. minoxidil is not a DHT blocker it helps hair regrow by increasing the blood flow to the follicle, but at the same time your hair follicles will be still attacked by DHT and androgens. One problem with propecia is that while it sharply reduces DHT, it also sharply increases scalp testosterone. I believe that testosterone (in addition to DHT) plays a role in hair loss. So if you're considering using propecia you should be sure to use an anti-androgen also. As a result it would be logical to use Finasteride (Propecia / Proscar) in conjunction with an anti-androgen. The former reduces the amount of DHT on your scalp while the latter blocks the remaning DHT at the receptor sites
I can assure you that you will experience success if you add those topical anti-androgens to your oral propecia. Don't stop the propecia, but you might eventually be able to reduce the propecia amount and still maintain.
ust like with any other drug that we have now, you have to understand the benefits, limits and set your expectation right.
Let suppose that Fluridil suppresses 30% of the AR..what does it mean ? that is not enough to have a major impact at stopping hairloss used on its own.
BUT when used with another anti-androgen which has a different mode of action..it will boost the overall effectiveness of the combo by 30%..(so to speak) which is very significant.
therefore it has to be used in combo with another anti-androgen such as RU or flutamide, spironolactone, finasteride etc..
the best approach to androgenc alopecia is a combo of drugs that targets the androgenic issues from different angles. But perhaps you don't need all the 3 drugs (finasteride+RU+Fluridil) to have success in your case, depending on how severe your stage of hairloss is.
Castrated men never go bald..they don't need minoxidil, they don't need a healthy diet or vitamins..they can eat burgers and drink beer all day & smoke and still not go bald..
