switching from finasteride to dutasteride

[powersam]

as they work the same way basically, if you were to switch from finasteride to a dose of dutasteride with comparable 5ar2 inhibition rates, would there be any reason for this to affect your treatment. ie/ people say give a treatment a year or more, but if you were on finasteride for 6 months and switched to similar inhibiting dutasteride dose, at the end of another 6 months you should be able to count that as a year of treatment no?

because its the follicle we are waiting for here, not the treatment right? so that follicle would have had a year of far less dht and therefore should be as well off as someone else who had stayed on only finasteride for the year, or only dutasteride for the year... yes/no?

 

[Rage]

Yes, you're right. But if you're going to take a dutasteride dose that is equivalent to finasteride, why are you doing it? You are opening yourself up to more side effects because typeI AR is more widely distributed (like the brain).

 

[powersam]

http://www.hairlosstalk.com/discussions ... highlight=

 

[Felk]

Sorry, im to lazy to read the whole thread, but i'd say definately sleep on it before you make the switch, especially since a lot of ccs's posts are his "on paper" theories, based on many assumptions/calculations of his own.

Unless it's a money issue, in which case i'd say your health is more important than a small cash saving. Finasteride is a much safer bet for hair loss.

Also, you're getting results on finasteride last time i heard from you, why mess with success?

 

[powersam]

the question is more out of interest than anything else. probably not going to change things at the moment, but i'm still curious.

 

[CCS]

Dutasteride does not inhibit 5ar1 at low doses. Well it does very slightly, like 1-3% at 0.1mg/day, but finasteride also inhibits 5ar1 to a very small extent. 0.5mg/day was FDA approved. 0.1mg dutasteride/day is the same as 5mg finasteride, and that is not paperwork, but FDA phaseII trial results and published DHT graphs. I'm not sure how much is the same as propecia, but I know 0.05mg/day dutasteride is weaker than propecia.

The problem with taking dutasteride once every 5 days is at that low dose the half life is much shorter. It might be better to dissolve some in ethanol and take some drops every so often, but ethanol evaporates. Water would slow the evaporation, but I don't know how much water you could add before the dutasteride was no longer soluble in the solution.

I think dutasteride twice a week should not have any half life issues, but then you are getting a bit more DHT inhibition than the 5mg finasteride. At this dose, you probably inhibit 5-10% of 5ar1. I can't be accurate since i don't know the steady state concentration. But I do know that 3x per week inhibits about 15% of the DHT from 5ar1, so that is an upper limit for the 2x per week.

Having an everclear bottle laying around might make people wonder about you, but if you dissolve 5 dutasteride tablets in 15 mL of everclear and add another 15mL of water to that and take 0.5 mL per day orally, that would probably give you propecia like effects. 6 would give you proscar effects. 3 would be weaker than propecia. The 6 and 3 are facts. The 5 is my guess.

IF
1) the dutasteride is soluble in that mixture
and
2) dutasteride is just as effetive whether you swallow a pill or chew it in your mouth and then swallow.

I believe those are good assumptions, but you should ask Bryan first before you risk your hair. Maybe absorption might be different. If you get the effect of 0.05mg dutasteride per day, you will get worse results than propecia, and probably worse than 0.5mg/day finasteride. But you would still probably maintain.

 

[powersam]

edited again - ccs could you be a little more clear about what you think as to the original question of the thread?

 

[CCS]

Sam,

I though you were asking people if you could switch from finasteride to dutasteride but use a dose of dutasteride that gave the same effect as the finasteride. I have no idea why you would want to go through the bother, but I stated how to do it.

What was your question?

 

[powersam]

nah it was more about the follicle itself. i'll put it another way.

say we have 3 men, one is on 5mg finasteride for a year, another is on a dutasteride dose which inhibits as much dht as 5mg finasteride for a year, and a third man who is on 5mg finasteride for 6 months and 5mg dutasteride for 6 months.

theoretically the third mans hair should be as good as the first two, even though he switched treatments midway right? as his hair was always protected from dht though different treatments were used.

maybe its not an important question, but i would still like opinions.

 

[Guest]

sam i'm not a scientist but is it possible that it would take some time for your body to adjust to the dutasteride and that your dht levels would rise a bit during this point without doing a loading dose?

have you considered taking 0.5 mg of propecia 3 times a week and combining that with 0.5 mg dutasteride 3 times a week to let you ease into the dutasteride if you are concerned about what i said above.

like i said above im not sure if what i said has any validity.

 

[CCS]

Sam,

I think the results would be the same. The dutasteride levels would be more stable than the finasteride levels, and DHT levels would vary a bit more with the finasteride than with the dutasteride, but they would average the same. So I think the results would be the same.

Even if that variance did cause a change, I don't think that is what you were asking. I think you were asking if there would be a big shed in the middle, and my answer is no, definitely not. The only way that would happen is if the new pill was fake, or you just happened to worsen then.

I don't know why your temples got better when you switched from 0.5mg/day dutasteride to 0.5 mg/day finasteride. I would expect the opposite to occure.