What do you think of low-dose finasteride?

[Norwoody]

Obviously there has been a lot of discussion regarding SERUM DHT and using lower dosages. What about SCALP DHT? Check out Kevin's video. I didn't even know such a study existed. Problem is that it is obviously one study. Could doses of 0.05-0.25mg potentially be nearly as potent for reducing DHT in the scalp?

@DoctorHouse
@Experimentality

 

[DoctorHouse]

Obviously there has been a lot of discussion regarding SERUM DHT and using lower dosages. What about SCALP DHT? Check out Kevin's video. I didn't even know such a study existed. Problem is that it is obviously one study. Could doses of 0.05-0.25mg potentially be nearly as potent for reducing DHT in the scalp?

@DoctorHouse
@Experimentality

I don't think those doses will be as effective as 1mg. I remember once reading 1mg was the magic number because it would be an appropriate dose for most body masses even with large variations.

 

[Micky_007]

Obviously there has been a lot of discussion regarding SERUM DHT and using lower dosages. What about SCALP DHT? Check out Kevin's video. I didn't even know such a study existed. Problem is that it is obviously one study. Could doses of 0.05-0.25mg potentially be nearly as potent for reducing DHT in the scalp?

@DoctorHouse
@Experimentality

If such low doses are effective, then why wouldn't things like Saw Palmetto used topically not be effective as well?

 

[corkmeister]

Obviously there has been a lot of discussion regarding SERUM DHT and using lower dosages. What about SCALP DHT? Check out Kevin's video. I didn't even know such a study existed. Problem is that it is obviously one study. Could doses of 0.05-0.25mg potentially be nearly as potent for reducing DHT in the scalp?

@DoctorHouse
@Experimentality

Although it tells you much more than serum dht, scalp dht still doesn't give the full picture because it's most likely about levels of dht in the follicle, which we can't measure.

If you're interested in the efficacy of lower doses I would look at other benchmarks instead. There's a study that shows 0.2mg makes a substantial difference in terms of hair count:

There is no such data for < 0.2mg but you can kind of eyeball what the level of effectiveness would be compared to 1mg daily.

If such low doses are effective, then why wouldn't things like Saw Palmetto used topically not be effective as well?

Because there's still a substantial difference between finasteride (even at low doses) and saw palmetto.

 

[Norwoody]

I wonder if low doses might be beneficial for those who get upregulation and could prevent some of the periodic shedding that goes along with that.

@user394587

 

[Micky_007]

Although it tells you much more than serum dht, scalp dht still doesn't give the full picture because it's most likely about levels of dht in the follicle, which we can't measure.

If you're interested in the efficacy of lower doses I would look at other benchmarks instead. There's a study that shows 0.2mg makes a substantial difference in terms of hair count:

View attachment 172453

There is no such data for < 0.2mg but you can kind of eyeball what the level of effectiveness would be compared to 1mg daily.



Because there's still a substantial difference between finasteride (even at low doses) and saw palmetto.

What is this substantial difference you refer to? They are both 5AR inhibitors.

The substantial difference is that one is a drug and one is a natural treatment.

320mg of Saw Palmetto has shown in several studies to have similar results to 1mg of Finasteride. Yes not identical results as Finasteride, but pretty close for a natural treatment.

My point is that the equivalent of low dose Finasteride, is not far off from the equivalent of 320mg oral Saw Palmetto, so if Low Dose Topical Finasteride is effective, then why wouldn't the topical equivalent of 320mg oral Saw Palmetto have been breaking news for being highly effective at treating Androgenetic Alopecia.

Also, yes the graph you showed says that low dose Finasteride has almost the same results as 1mg Finasteride, but the majority of users have found low dose Finasteride to be ineffective, most people don't go under 0.5mg. Finasteride.
It's not the first time pro-Finasteride studies showed questionable findings.

 

[debyne]

I can tell you from personal experience that those charts didn’t mean much to me from a real life perspective. I’ve been on finasteride and min for 13 years. For the first 12 years, I was on 1mg and it was effective at halting loss. Min gave me regrowth. Because of all the “studies”, I dropped my finasteride dosage to 0.5mg and felt great but started to shed after 3 months. In early September, I upped my dose to 0.67mg and the shedding stopped after 3 weeks.

Everyone is different. Unfortunately, the only way anyone will know the best dose for them is trial and error. FWIW, the Hair Loss docs on Youtube said that at 0.8mg, finasteride is maxed out in effectiveness and one shouldn’t need more than that. No idea how they know that.

 

[corkmeister]

What is this substantial difference you refer to? They are both 5AR inhibitors.

The substantial difference is that one is a drug and one is a natural treatment.

320mg of Saw Palmetto has shown in several studies to have similar results to 1mg of Finasteride. Yes not identical results as Finasteride, but pretty close for a natural treatment.

My point is that the equivalent of low dose Finasteride, is not far off from the equivalent of 320mg oral Saw Palmetto, so if Low Dose Topical Finasteride is effective, then why wouldn't the topical equivalent of 320mg oral Saw Palmetto have been breaking news for being highly effective at treating Androgenetic Alopecia.

Also, yes the graph you showed says that low dose Finasteride has almost the same results as 1mg Finasteride, but the majority of users have found low dose Finasteride to be ineffective, most people don't go under 0.5mg. Finasteride.
It's not the first time pro-Finasteride studies showed questionable findings.

The substantial difference is that Saw Palmetto is a much weaker 5ar-inhibitor with very weak evidence for significantly stopping hair loss, both in studies and anecdotally. Can you show me the studies that show that 320mg of Saw Palmetto has similar results to taking 1mg of finasteride? I'm not well versed enough in the science surrounding Saw Palmetto to say you're wrong without a doubt but this seems very unlikely to me, although I'd be curious to read the studies.

I don't understand the leap of logic you're making here to be honest. You conclude that lower dosages of finasteride can't work, because otherwise Saw Palmetto would work and we would have heard about it by now, but at the same time you also believe that using Saw Palmetto is comparable to taking 1mg of finasteride? Of which the latter has been proven to be highly effective at stopping hair loss?

The majority of users found low dose finasteride to be ineffective? What are you basing this on? The studies show that lower doses (let's say 0.2mg) reduce a comparable level of scalp dht, and improve hair count. Not as well as 1mg daily, but somewhat comparable. And I also know that at least in Japan 0.2mg tablets are available. It may not be effective for everyone but based on the data I see no real basis to conclude that these doses are necessarily ineffective.

And how is the study I cited a 'pro-finasteride' study? You think they forged the results to show that lower doses of finasteride can also be effective? What agenda would that serve? To get people to buy less finasteride? And the findings are questionable because you've personally observed that the 'majority of users' found low doses to be ineffective? I really don't understand how you're arriving at these conclusions.

 

[Micky_007]

The substantial difference is that Saw Palmetto is a much weaker 5ar-inhibitor with very weak evidence for significantly stopping hair loss, both in studies and anecdotally. Can you show me the studies that show that 320mg of Saw Palmetto has similar results to taking 1mg of finasteride? I'm not well versed enough in the science surrounding Saw Palmetto to say you're wrong without a doubt but this seems very unlikely to me, although I'd be curious to read the studies.

I don't understand the leap of logic you're making here to be honest. You conclude that lower dosages of finasteride can't work, because otherwise Saw Palmetto would work and we would have heard about it by now, but at the same time you also believe that using Saw Palmetto is comparable to taking 1mg of finasteride? Of which the latter has been proven to be highly effective at stopping hair loss?

The majority of users found low dose finasteride to be ineffective? What are you basing this on? The studies show that lower doses (let's say 0.2mg) reduce a comparable level of scalp dht, and improve hair count. Not as well as 1mg daily, but somewhat comparable. And I also know that at least in Japan 0.2mg tablets are available. It may not be effective for everyone but based on the data I see no real basis to conclude that these doses are necessarily ineffective.

And how is the study I cited a 'pro-finasteride' study? You think they forged the results to show that lower doses of finasteride can also be effective? What agenda would that serve? To get people to buy less finasteride? And the findings are questionable because you've personally observed that the 'majority of users' found low doses to be ineffective? I really don't understand how you're arriving at these conclusions.

To cut the long story short, even Merck, the manufacturer of Propecia has recently shut down its website for Propecia:

https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/merck-shuts-down-propecia-website-23826

"Almost all drugs have some side effects. Yet it is unheard of for the manufacturers of these other drugs to just shut down their site one day. Perhaps with all of the pending and upcoming litigation their legal staff has advised them to minimize communication/information about the product until they can vet all of the language written within the warnings and listed side effects."

If Finasteride were even remotely as effective and safe as the Pro-Finasteride studies make it out to be, they obviously wouldn't be in this situation.

Big Pharma has all the money to conduct what seemingly looks like top tier studies to make their treatments look good, but people forget that data/study results can be manipulated, efficacy can be overstated, safety can be overstated. Saw Palmetto does not have this luxury, for obvious reasons, barely anyone would fund a study on a natural supplement.

There have been articles from various big sources including Harvard University, CNN, Drugwatch.com, etc that all speak of the low quality of drugs that have been passed by the FDA, about how Big Pharma keeps in close contact with the FDA whereby such relationship results in the FDA reducing clinical trial requirements and easing the pass rate of drugs.

They also said the 4th Leading cause of death in the US is from FDA approved drugs.

Furthermore, Big Pharma has all the money to easily conduct what seems like gold standard studies to make the their drugs look far better than what they often are. They have the money to fund many of the so-called "independent studies" done on their drugs. Buying off scientists and regulatory members is easily do-able for Big Pharma.

For this reason, thinking that anyone can simply take a study of Finasteride vs Saw Palmetto from the internet and make a direct comparison thinning it's going to be the gospel truth is not going to work. There's way too many reasons why they'd be false Pro-Finasteride information. The financial incentive is there.

Propecia selling for around $100 to $150 per month supply is lot of money when you multiply that by approximately several million users.

And regarding where I got it from that "low doses od Finasteride have been ineffective even though according to those studies that show Finasteride even at low doses inhibits almost the same amount of DHT as in high doses of 1mg", that is mainly from actual people who have used Finasteride from many different forums and hairloss websites. For those that do get benefits from Finasteride, its most often from the higher doses.

 

[Norwoody]

Can we not turn this into the pro-anti finasteride debate? There is already a thread for that. I was hoping we could get into some theorizing regarding what would be the optimal lower dosage.

 

[Micky_007]

Can we not turn this into the pro-anti finasteride debate? There is already a thread for that. I was hoping we could get into some theorizing regarding what would be the optimal lower dosage.

Yes, sure, I do apologize for this as I know this tends to happen, I will refrain from commenting here.

 

[debyne]

We all know finasteride is a drug that isn’t good for the human body. No drug is. It’s all about balancing risk and reward.

 

[user394587]

There's a lack of outcome evidence to suggest anything below 0.2mg of finasteride will work for the maintenance of hair.

Something to make note of is that it takes time for the 5AR enzyme to regenerate. There's evidence to suggest that taking the medication on alternate days could provide the same benefit as taking it daily as a result.

For those curious, there was a study conducted by Vermeulen et al. that details this https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1722168/.

The relevant figure:

If you use the 0.5mg and 5mg dose as a proxy for 1mg, it would appear that serum DHT levels, and by extension tissue levels, only begin to significantly rise three days after the dose.

The question is, what dose do you take on alternate days? There are various hair transplant specialists that anecdotally claim that taking 1mg on alternate days produces favorable outcomes, and that most people respond to this. This is the dose that I personally take and it seems to be doing its job.

Anecdotally, I've heard of people having success with 0.5mg on alternate days, but I would wager that these are likely incidents of non-aggressive hair loss.

 

[debyne]

There's a lack of outcome evidence to suggest anything below 0.2mg of finasteride will work for the maintenance of hair.

Something to make note of is that it takes time for the 5AR enzyme to regenerate. There's evidence to suggest that taking the medication on alternate days could provide the same benefit as taking it daily as a result.

For those curious, there was a study conducted by Vermeulen et al. that details this https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1

If you use the 0.5mg and 5mg dose as a proxy for 1mg, it would appear that serum DHT levels, and by extension tissue levels, only begin to significantly rise three days after the dose.

The question is, what dose do you take on alternate days? There are various hair transplant specialists that anecdotally claim that taking 1mg on alternate days produces favorable outcomes, and that most people respond to this. This is the dose that I personally take and it seems to be doing its job.

Anecdotally, I've heard of people having success with 0.5mg on alternate days, but I would wager that these are likely incidents of non-aggressive hair loss.

Interesting. Makes me think it’s better to go 1mg EOD vs 0.5mg ED.

 

[debyne]

The question is, what dose do you take on alternate days? There are various hair transplant specialists that anecdotally claim that taking 1mg on alternate days produces favorable outcomes, and that most people respond to this. This is the dose that I personally take and it seems to be doing its job.

Anecdotally, I've heard of people having success with 0.5mg on alternate days, but I would wager that these are likely incidents of non-aggressive hair loss.

I was on 1mg for 12 years, dropped to 0.5mg last April and felt great, started shedding hair after three months, so I upped it to 0.67mg and the shedding stopped. For 0.67mg, I take 1mg on day 1, 0.5mg on days 2 and 3, then repeat. I noticed a very slight decrease in libido from 0.5mg to 0.67mg, but it could be in my head.

Given the graph above, I may now switch to 1mg EOD just to see if effectiveness changes or if I experience any change in sides since it'll be back to 0.5mg daily on average. I also wonder if my shedding stopped on my 0.67mg because I had a 1mg dose in my regimen every 3 days.

There's only one way to find out.

 

[DoctorHouse]

For all the anti finasteride people, it will be interesting to see what they will do if they get diagnosed with an enlarged prostate later in life.

 

[Norwoody]

For all the anti finasteride people, it will be interesting to see what they will do if they get diagnosed with an enlarged prostate later in life.

Straight to duta lol.

 

[infamousrodi]

If and when I get back on finasteride I’m doing a low dose .5 mg I hear is just as potent as 1mg daily.

 

[debyne]

If and when I get back on finasteride I’m doing a low dose .5 mg I hear is just as potent as 1mg daily.

0.5mg causes me to shed. 1mg does not. They’re not the same potency for everyone. I don’t care what the inhibition curve says.

 

[DoctorHouse]

If and when I get back on finasteride I’m doing a low dose .5 mg I hear is just as potent as 1mg daily.

I would do the same if I were in your shoes.