Proof That Constantly Changing Dose Causes Problems.

[Samson123]

I'm reposting these pictures to illustrate that people have severe adverse reactions to finasteride that results in worse hairloss. This is not a side effect that is often talked about and that's a shame because I am not alone in this and there will be more people that will suffer. finasteride use in some people can greatly sensitize one's hair follicles way beyond the ability of the drug to protect them. I was slowly thinning primarily in the frontal third for three years before I started finasteride. In nine months I was thinning everywhere, crown, sides, midscalp and even the donor area. Prior to finasteride these areas were very thick. Not only did I lose a ton of hair but all of my hair became very fine. Since finasteride had done nothing but kick my hair loss into overdrive, I decided to taper off 1.25 mg because I had read a few accounts of people getting worse on finasteride, quitting, and recovering somewhat. I tapered down to .5 mg for six months and was more or less stable. In june I tapered down to .25 mg over a couple of weeks. These pics were taken two weeks apart and the second one was taken after seven days on .25 mg. This is no one's rate of hairloss. This is an unnatural, insane rate of hairloss. This basically happened overnight and considering I had no problems in the crown and midscalp prior to finasteride, this is many, many years of hairloss that literally happened in an instant. Also, my hair became even finer and my thinnest areas are in my donor area now. To say I'm depressed about this is a huge understatement and taking finasteride is the biggest regret of my life, but I want to inform others that are considering finasteride use about this. Who fits the profile of a negative finasteride responder? I don't know, but my best guess is that it would be guys that are losing hair with low dht levels, which I think indicates a greater follicular sensitivity to dht. I've been back on .5 mg for over three months now with no improvement.

 

[abcdefg]

I would never say its impossible that a drug like finasteride could cause increased hair loss in very rare cases. When no one understands how something works anything is possible
That being said you were on finasteride how long total? If you have not been on it for at least a year then you never gave it enough time. Hair doesnt grow in a few weeks it takes years

 

[Samson123]

I was on 1.25 mg ED for 15 months before lowering to .5 mg. I've been on finasteride for over two years now.

 

[abcdefg]

I was on 1.25 mg ED for 15 months before lowering to .5 mg. I've been on finasteride for over two years now.

Ah okay. I know its easy to say but was your hair about the same length in both pictures? When the lighting changes it really makes it hard to see the honest difference. It does look noticeably thinner but the lighting and maybe hair length seem a little different.
It could have progressed naturally if it never worked for the entire time you were on it, but does seem odd.
I would like to hear the theories on why finasteride would make hair loss worse, but the honest answer is no one really knows. We hardly know anything about male pattern baldness still.

 

[Armando Jose]

I'm reposting these pictures to illustrate that people have severe adverse reactions to finasteride that results in worse hairloss. View attachment 44337 View attachment 44338

Had you a diagnosis for androgenetic alopecia?
It seem for me only a natural whorl, and finas is not a preventive method. IMO Any med thaat can interfere natural hair cycle can be bad for a healthy hair

 

[horunger]

My first thought too was "does this guy really have male pattern baldness?" Have you been checked for possible causes? Unfortunately There are some guys who tend to leave out important info, like health issues, but still make hasty conclusions giving blame or credit to treatments they been on.

How about your hairline, is it receading like normal male pattern baldness or just thinning there too?

 

[Samson123]

The loss is obvious. The pictures speak for themselves. Now that my hair has grown out some, the crown looks terrible. Just a few months ago my thinning crown would be undetectable unless in bright light and now it is visibly balding in any light. The quality of the hair left is utterly thin, limp, and lifeless. I am very healthy with no underlying health issues. My hair went to hell after I took finasteride. It's willfully ignorant and lunacy to not make the correlation between the two. My hairline and temples had receded about a centimeter when I started finasteride. I would say I have DPA with minor recession. the diffuse thinning was in the front and my mid scalp and crown were still thick. Finasteride accelerates hairloss in some because it can make hair follicles, through AR upregulation, way more sensitive to dht. Clearly scalp hair follicles have a strong affinity for dht and with some men the inibited dht puts hair follicles into 'starvation' mode and the body scrambles to counteract this with increased receptors. This can backfire on some men, ie, the ones that already had very sensitive hair follicles to begin with. BTW, the 'catch up' hairloss after quitting finasteride IS AR upregulation. If finasteride didn't do anything to increase sensitivity to dht then hairloss would resume at it's pre finasteride rate upon quitting the drug. This, for the most part, does not happen. finasteride made all of my 'safe' hair susceptible to balding now. The holes in my once perfect donor area and sides can attest to that. I have no idea why people are so loathe to admit the obvious.

 

[Ashkan63]

you cant judge finastride if you have taken it less than six months 1 mg everyday ,first complete the treatment,meanwhile anything can happen but the final result is important

 

[michel sapin]

so you got constant shedding while on propecia ? for me it doesnt work but i don't lose that much hair , just no reverse of miniaturization

 

[Samson123]

so you got constant shedding while on propecia ? for me it doesnt work but i don't lose that much hair , just no reverse of miniaturization

No. I never had constant shedding just a massive one at nine months everywhere and then stability, more or less, for a year, and then another massive shed after I lowered the dose to .25 mg for a week.

This happened to me while on Finasteride also. You are not alone, and I, nor anyone else can probably give you an answer to why this happens. Probably for the same reasons some experience side effects while others don't. It's possible something in the drug causes inflammation as I was only experiencing telogen effluvium which it sounds like you have to me. Generally male pattern baldness won't effect your sides or donor area unless it's a rare diffused type of AA.

I know exactly why it happens. I explained it in the post above. Whereas, as an example, I had 10 receptors before finasteride, now I have 100. I am 100% that I was losing hair not due to high levels of dht but rather to very sensitive receptors. The proof for this is that .25 mg is supposedly just as effective as 1 mg but just after one week on that dose I lost what looks like years of hairloss. That's not an exaggeration at all. It's really depressing to think about how long it would have taken me to lose that much had I not taken finasteride. I think around ten years or so considering I was thinning slowly in the frontal third for three or more years before starting finasteride yet still had a way above average head of hair compared to most people. I've never lost that much hair at one time. The worst thing is it pushed all of my remaining hair that much closer to falling out. All of my hair is so fine now, which means the roots are very shallow, thus more susceptible to loss. When I tug on my hair it feels barely rooted in the scalp. The truth is some peoples body's will always be able to stay one step ahead of them in regards to hairloss meds.

 

[Samson123]

I'm a little drunk right now, which is the new norm for me, so I will make a drunken analogy. My scalp is like a massive maximum security prison filled with the most violent criminals ever seen (my androgen receptors) and a few naked super models (dht) are parading up down the cells, night and day, while the prisoners are going crazy, raging and screaming, stretching their arms as far as they can through the bars just hoping to grab hold of one and the only thing keeping all hell from breaking loose are a couple of security guards (finasteride).

 

[WereInaRecession]

I was on finasteride for 10 months and my haircut every month or 2 looked worse than before taking it srs. I would see new thin spots appear where I never had a problem before. So either random timing where my Androgenetic Alopecia sped up at same time or something else is going on with us. I don't get it myself as it doesn't make since

 

[That Guy]

There is no logical, scientific reason why an inhibitor like finasteride would cause hair to get WORSE. It's literally blocking the sh*t that makes your hair thin.

So many people assume that because their hair got worse when using minoxidil or finasteride that therefore the meds must have made it worse, when the more likely answer is that you simply didn't respond to the treatment very well.

 

[horunger]

The loss is obvious. The pictures speak for themselves. Now that my hair has grown out some, the crown looks terrible. Just a few months ago my thinning crown would be undetectable unless in bright light and now it is visibly balding in any light. The quality of the hair left is utterly thin, limp, and lifeless. I am very healthy with no underlying health issues. My hair went to hell after I took finasteride. It's willfully ignorant and lunacy to not make the correlation between the two. My hairline and temples had receded about a centimeter when I started finasteride. I would say I have DPA with minor recession. the diffuse thinning was in the front and my mid scalp and crown were still thick. Finasteride accelerates hairloss in some because it can make hair follicles, through AR upregulation, way more sensitive to dht. Clearly scalp hair follicles have a strong affinity for dht and with some men the inibited dht puts hair follicles into 'starvation' mode and the body scrambles to counteract this with increased receptors. This can backfire on some men, ie, the ones that already had very sensitive hair follicles to begin with. BTW, the 'catch up' hairloss after quitting finasteride IS AR upregulation. If finasteride didn't do anything to increase sensitivity to dht then hairloss would resume at it's pre finasteride rate upon quitting the drug. This, for the most part, does not happen. finasteride made all of my 'safe' hair susceptible to balding now. The holes in my once perfect donor area and sides can attest to that. I have no idea why people are so loathe to admit the obvious.

Im not questioning your result with fina, i simply feel it is important to establish with certainty that your hairloss prior to fina is indeed consistent with conventional male pattern baldness symptoms. And it seems now it is.

 

[pjhair]

There is no logical, scientific reason why an inhibitor like finasteride would cause hair to get WORSE. It's literally blocking the sh*t that makes your hair thin.

Finasteride can and has made hair worse for many people. Happened to me too. Please look up "reflex hyperandrogenicity". You should also read up Dr. Proctors explanation for why it happens.

 

[Samson123]

I appreciate that pjhair.

This is a place where people come to learn how to save their hair, not hurt it. The truth that needs to be stated clearly and often is that any hairloss meds can worsen the problem. There are horror stories for every treatment out there. When I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with my hair I couldn't believe how many personal accounts there were where finasteride accelerated hairloss. The people that come to this forum and read a thread like this and think 'damn, finasteride really screwed up this guy's hair', which is the truth, and then some a**h** jumps on and muddies the waters by denying the reality that I and others have experienced. People need to know exactly what they are risking when they try a dht inhibitor. Other people will suffer when all they hear is sh*t like 'it's scientifically impossible for finasteride to make hairloss worse'.

Everyone with male pattern baldness is not necessarily a candidate for dht inhibitors and people losing hair despite having low dht levels need to consider their use carefully. Starting with a low dose for example. Another thing that might confuse people is this bullshit belief that .2 mg is the same as 1 mg. Wasn't at all for me, nor gi joey, or the guy last year, forget his username, who mistakenly was quartering 1 mg pills thinking they were 5 mg and his hair went to sh*t. Real life experiences show what utter bullshit the studies about finasteride are and people put way too much faith in them. Who knows what the percentage of people who will get worse on finasteride. Based on what I've read it's way more than an occasional freak response, yet no studies ever showed this.

 

[WereInaRecession]

What do you mean I wasn't a responder to the medicine it lowered my dht to 7 ng/ml or whatever their scale is. I got blood test. That's what it's suppose to do But somehow the mirror didn't lie. I absolutely got worse while on it than i was before. How that's possible idk. I'm just telling my personal story. Many people have shown great results from finasteride and I would recommend people hop on it even if I didn't get results. Trust me I would love to have it have worked and stabilise my hair I literally can't go thru with my plan to get a hair transplant now because in not confidant my male pattern baldness isn't just not halted but actually accelerating somehow.I have all the incentive give a favorable opinion but for me it got worse somehow.if that's caused by finasteride or another random variable idk but it happened.

 

[BaldingHelpMe]

Everyone with male pattern baldness is not necessarily a candidate for dht inhibitors and people losing hair despite having low dht levels need to consider their use carefully.

So what do us balding men do? Not take these drugs and be bald? I don't think there is much choice we have here, we could only take them and hope for the best. Fortunately these drugs do work for most of us.

 

[Samson123]

I never suggested that people not try finasteride. It's a miracle drug for some people. It's the approach that's completely screwed up. Everyone is different and the 1 mg finasteride everyday is too broad too account for these differences. When it works, it works, when it doesn't or someone has a negative response to it the variations are all over the place, chronic Telogen Effluvium, scalp inflammation, rapid receding, shedding in 'safe' zones. I think most of these bad reactions can be mitigated by getting a dht test. That should give one a rough idea of how well they will respond to finasteride. We know what the drug does, it inhibits dht, so obviously people with high dht levels will benefit the most. It's a different story for people losing hair with low dht levels and dht inhibitors are riskier, they might be of some benefit, maybe slow the process down a little. These people need to start at a lower dose. The problem is people keep throwing this canard around that you can't take a low dose of finasteride because small doses are just as effective as higher doses and this is simply not true for everyone. I can't believe that after 25 years of finasteride use that doctors, derms, hairloss forum members, don't recommend taking a smarter approach.

 

[abcdefg]

Well hair loss and hormones are a lot more complicated then just lower DHT. No one can chart male pattern baldness the whole process of DHT and everything else from start to finish because no one knows everything involved. You cant explain things that no one fully understands just guess. Lots of people and doctors have their guesses why this might happen, but no one knows really.
Assuming it even happens at all and its not just one of many other things like it never worked for you in the first place