I am 18 and am now losing my hair and worried about the sexual side effects of Propecia
The internet has spread a great deal of information and misinformation about Propecia (finasteride) which is much over-blown. You need to put the decision in perspective. The risk of these sexual side effects are between 2-4% depending upon the sources you read. My son has been on this drug for 15 year and found an increased sexual drive, not a decreased sexual drive which his girlfriend appreciated very much. How often do you hear about an increased sexual drive? Answer: very, very rarely.
If you were one of the unlucky men to get the sexual side effect, 99+ % of these men find that the side effects go away within 2 weeks upon stopping the drug. Some very small percentage report long term sexual side effects; however these risks are very, very infrequent (less than 1% of the 2-4% people who get negative side effects that persists). Many of the people who reported these sexual side effects may have had sexual dysfunction (normally present in 30% of men 40, 40% of men 40, 50%+ in men over 50) so it is easy to blame this drug for sexual side effects when reduced sexual drive is unfortunately, a sign of aging in many men. Rarely do we see this in 19 year old men, however, you can have a placebo effect if you believe you will be one of them.
The real decision before you, of course, is the problem of progressive balding which this drug is very effective in treating in men of your age. It even reverses the hair loss in many men under 20. You are clearly in the drivers seat, so be careful about what you read and put everything you research into a proper perspective.
It is nice to see that this blog now acknowledges Post Finasteride Syndrome but Balding Blog is still one of the main sources of misinformation about Propecia on the web that is referenced in this very post.
The post says 99+% of people that develop side effects see they go away but this is not true and based on no data at all. There is a support group at PropeciaHelp.com that has over a thousand members which is enough to disprove the side effects are not as rare as this blog claims.
I don’t know why it has taken more than a full decade before post finasteride syndrome was acknowledged on this blog. It is a poor source of accurate information and not much more than a marketing device.
I use finasteride since 1997 and it worked wonders for me untill today. Gratefull for that..
This is in response to Inaccurate’s statement.
Inaccurate says “The post says 99+% of people that develop side effects see they go away but this is not true and based on no data at all. There is a support group at PropeciaHelp.com that has over a thousand members which is enough to disprove the side effects are not as rare as this blog claims”.
Let’s play with these numbers a bit. Before Merck’s patent on Propecia expired in 2013, it was estimated that a little over a million prescriptions had been written for Finasteride (very conservative estimate). Let’s run with your claim that PropeciaHelp.com has “over a thousand member” (very liberal estimate). First, we’ll round down the number of Propecia users to 1,000,000 and the number of PropeciaHelp.com members to 1,000. Let’s do the math:
1000/1000000 = 0.001
0.1% is a little lower than the “1% of the 2-4%” that the blog post’s author has even suggested. Of course, not everyone who might claim to be suffering from PFS will be a registered member of PropeciaHelp.com but imagine for a second, the 1,000,000 figure I cited above -that ONLY includes individuals on 1mg non-generic Finasteride (before generics appeared). Thus it does not include the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) who were prescribed 5mg Finasteride (Proscar) for BPH. Thus the denominator is likely even larger than the numerator. As far as the numerator, I’m not aware of a “Proscarhelp.com” so I assume if any Proscar users think they are suffering from PFS then they would also likely join such a site. Of course, I’m sure there are people who think they are suffering from PFS but who are not members of this online support group. We don’t know their figures but its safe to say that Inaccurate’s quick math was quite inaccurate.
Websites with “testimonials” are no more scientific than any other source. They are a collection of men with conditions that may be multifactorial, including sexual dysfunction from aging, medications, psychological reasons, etc. What the Post-finasteride syndrome advocates need to do is spend less time with websites and litigation and more time studying the phenomena in a controlled fashion in prospective, blinded studies. I suspect the syndrome exists but in a small percentage of men.