Powersams story

[powersam]

i guess i've been here long enough that i should be writing up something like this.

noticed hair loss around 21 - 22, recession and slight thinning. went a little bit nuts as we all do and did nothing for a while. oh i think i may have bought some shampoo with biotin in it but obviously that did nothing. pfft. tried some totally idiotic things like the waseda regimen et al (dont bother) and generally kept going bald.

found hair loss talk back in the days when BruceLee was around to keep me on the straight and narrow and finally worked out that there is no quick and easy cure at the moment and if i want to keep my hair its going to take some dedication.

used avodart for 18 months and successfully maintained with very little side effects, i had a slightly raised and lowered libido. went to scotland for a while and forgot to organise more dutasteride so i had none for around 2 months, and in that time i was reading about loading doses etc for dutasteride. when i got my dutasteride back i took 3 pills a day for 10 days and then went on to the .5mg a day dose. I then had the most horrid frontal shed imaginable, i could see the hair getting thinner by the week. this shed continued for a good 3 months at which point i simple stopped taking dutasteride, and the shed stopped.

about duts frontal sheds i don't know, some say its the massively higher testosterone levels in the scalp ( dutasteride at .5mg a day raises scalp testosterone by 104%) but there would still be less dht so i dont see why that would make a difference. all i know is that it happened to me.

anyway, i am now taking .5mg finasteride a day, and using spironolactone 5% in the mornings and fluridil at night. I am considering adding minoxidil 5% with retin A. i am also considering going back on dutasteride but at .5mg 3 times a week (stopping finasteride of course). but i havent made my mind up about this yet.

as to my hair, its still cosmetically acceptable though its definately obvious i i have a receded hair line. luckily it seems to suit me somewhat. i keep it short and that seems to make it less noticeable. i really think avodart is probably my best bet and i just screwed myself over with that idiotic loading dose ( i forgot there would still be significant levels of avodart in my system after two months) which was probably far too large a dose for me.

anyway, keeping minoxidil in the bank and hoping for HM to come out before i'm 30 (25 now).

Sam

 

[Guest]

Did the hair you were shedding from dutasteride ever grow back?

anyway, keeping minoxidil in the bank and hoping for HM to come out before i'm 30 (25 now).

hoping and praying....

 

[powersam]

not completely no, i regained some density i guess but not all of it. but that could simply have been the balding process at work.

yah HM which works as they have said it will, affordably, would be nice.

 

[Guest]

not completely no, i regained some density i guess but not all of it. but that could simply have been the balding process at work.

yah HM which works as they have said it will, affordably, would be nice.

have you considered going back to dutasteride and sticking with the 0.5 mg dose from the beginning?

JayMan

 

[powersam]

i'm considering dutasteride 3 x a week.. if i do go that way, i'll see how it goes and maybe up it to .5mg a day later on. but from all the evidence i've seen 3x a week should be enough.

minoxidil is my next move..

 

[Guest]

oh 3x a week is as effective as 7x a week?

 

[CCS]

It should be less effective than 7x, but pretty close, or at least closer to 7x than to proscar.

Supposedly DHT is 30 times as potent as testosterone, but it's binding affinity is pretty close to that of testosterone. I wonder if "potency" is not one dimensional. Maybe testosterone and DHT tell the follicle to do different things, and the front is different from the back. Some people regrow better in the front or back, but other theories could explain that. I just know that reducing DHT with propecia seems to do very good.

Interesting that Sam used real Avodart and still had this happen to him. A loading phase should have given him 2.5mg/day results, not a shed, though while he described the shed dramatically, many people who've done so still have a lot more hair than I do.

 

[powersam]

well its about percentages really. theres a good thread about it here http://www.hairlosstalk.com/discussions ... highlight=

 

[Guest]

A loading phase should have given him 2.5mg/day results, not a shed, though while he described the shed dramatically, many people who've done so still have a lot more hair than I do.

Hey ccs, if someonewere to ever need to switch to avodart from propecia, how long a loading phase should they do of 2.5 before decreasing to 0.5? How many days im wondering? And by 2.5 you do really mean taking 5 avodarts a day right?

Thanks.

 

[CCS]

There was already an experiment done with that. I have the graph. You don't have to do a loading phase, but doing so will get the half life longer sooner so you are safe if you miss a dose.

In the graph, 3 pills per day for 10 days got people to the same steady state level as would be reached by 0.5mg per day in 60 days.

A good reason NOT to use a loading phase is if you get side effects you will have them for months, whereas if you take the normal dose you can get rid of them sooner by stopping.

I only use the loading phase because at my low dose, being at steady state means I can take a dose every 5 days if I want, and worry about the half life.

I have not seen graphs for 5 per day, but if you did, I imagine it would take 6 days, based on 3x10/5= 6.

 

[Guest]

Oh ok. I was mistaken then. I thought the purpose of the loading dose was to get the maintenance and regrowth features of the drug started faster.

so you're saying that if someone is committed to taking the 0.5 mg dutasteride every MWF or whatever then there's no point in a loading dose?

 

[CCS]

dutasteride 0.5mg enters the blood and knocks out DHT fast. So it kind of is its own loading phase, compared to the 0.1mg pills used in some tests. But at low doses it is metabolized quickly unless you take it daily. That is another reason for a loading dose, to get past this fast metabolism phase. I don't know about the 3x per week one. I do know from graphs I've seen that 0.1 mg/day of dutasteride takes about 15-20 days to reduce DHT levels by as much as 5mg proscar does. 1 pill per day gets there in the first day and then drops them even lower after that. I'm guessing 3x per week would get you there in about a week.

Yeah, I forgot about that. A loading dose before using it once a day is just to get to 98% inhibition faster, which also takes about 20 days. It approaches it assymtoptically.

You don't need the loading phase if you are taking the finasteride, but people making a cold switch would need one.


Sam,

it is safe to switch from dutasteride to finasteride cold turkey, but if you switch from finasteride to a low dose of dutasteride, you need a loading phase, or a week or two of overlap if you are doing 3x per week, and maybe a month of overlap if you are doing 0.1mg per day.

 

[powersam]

honestly the reason i'm asking is because i forgot to order more finasteride and it wont be here for a while, but i have a month or two of avodart in the cupboard.

 

[Guest]

where are you getting it from powersam that it would take so long?

i would consider staying on dutasteride 3x a week till finasteride gets there.

 

[CCS]

you can start taking it, but you need to take one per day for three days, or maybe even two the first day, so you can outrun the short half life at low doses and get the DHT inhbition that finasteride would give. After those three days, you can start the 2-3 per week you want. 1 per week is iffy because it might get metabolised to fast.

 

[powersam]

plus i'm intrigued by the possibility of results comparable to 5mg finasteride with 3 dutasteride pills a week. i assume that the rate of side effects would have been similar also.?

 

[powersam]

now that i think about it, its not really possible for me to use dutasteride in the interim because i'm using .5mg finasteride a day and no dose of dutasteride is going to be low enough to be comparable to that. so i'd be jumping my hormones all over the place. maybe i 'll just do the sensible thing and go to a doctor for a script.