Dr. Rassman,
Thank you for maintaining this blog, its great to have a free trustworthy resource in a world full of scammers and misinformation.
I’m a 24 year old man and have been experiencing loss since age 18. I started on Propecia at 20 and was able to maintain my hair and score some regrowth. Unfortunately I stopped taking the drug for 10 months starting about two years ago. I started back on Propecia last May(2009).
My problem is that in the past 10 months, while back on Fin, I have experienced significant loss. My hair has gone from a solid norwood 2.5 with full density in the mid scalp and mild thinning in the crown to a norwood 3v with profound diffuse thinning all through the pattern. I have added Nizoral shampoo and some multivitamins to my regimen a few months ago. Still, my hair is getting progressively thinner. Do you think my situation is attributed to the catch-up loss phenomenon or could it be that my body has stopped responding to Propecia…or something else?
Thanks for your advice.
Thank you for following the site, but unfortunately, I really cannot give you a definitive answer.
You are likely losing hair due to genetics, but the degree of your balding is yet to be determined. Maybe you are destined to be a Norwood Class 3V and will stop there. Maybe it’ll get worse. I really couldn’t say. The key point I want you to understand is that there is nothing to stop your genetic fate at this point. Propecia will only slow things down, but I don’t believe your body stopped responding to it nor do I believe it necessarily stopped working. In fact, you may have experienced “catch-up” hair loss after stopping Propecia for 10 months. You could’ve experienced a shedding after restarting the medication or it could just be coincidental timing as the progression of your hair loss was in full swing.
In the end, I would suggest you follow up with your prescribing doctor and continue on with the treatment plan (Propecia).
It would not surprise me to find finasteride type of molecular formulations in things that grow. The original finasteride was identified in the Amazon rainforest as the natives ate tubers that had DHT-blocking abilities. In the naked native people it was clearly seen that the children did not develop their external genitalia (their penis) until they were close to puberty, there was something wrong. The drug finasteride (a DHT blocker) was eventually formulated from the analysis of this tuber. The sexual side effects were also identified in some of the children who were hermaphrodites, probably caused in the first trimester of the mother’s gestation. So I would want to know more about the Reishi mushroom (pictured at right) before you use it, and I would take Propecia (finasteride) rather then take a gamble on anything unknown. Propecia is taken by millions of men, so we know the side effects, rare as they are.
There are two HairDX tests — one which shows if you carry the genes for balding, and one which suggests how sensitive you are to finasteride. The statistics on both of these are not 100%, but HairDX doesn’t provide an actual accuracy percentage that I could find. I don’t have enough experience with HairDX to know how accurate they are first hand, but I would expect they’d be as accurate as possible. There are multiple reasons why accuracy could be skewed, including data collection errors, software errors, and disease.
Doctors, when prescribing medications, stay with medications that are FDA approved for the particular condition they are treating. That is because the FDA gives its stamp of approval that the drug is safe and effective for the condition that it is being prescribed for. The doctors have some restrictions in the way they use their medical license when prescribing drugs and their insurance carriers will not cover them for drug use outside the FDA approved drugs, so if something went wrong, they are bare for insurance coverage.