Finasteride Prevents a Quarter of Prostate Cancers from Developing?

Greetings Dr. Rassman,

I am a very happy patient of yours. (Background: I’ve had two procedures and am taking Propecia.)

I wanted to pass along the information below. Perhaps it would be useful for your blog. I was flying the other day, and in the airline magazine, there was an article on preventing cancer that mentioned finasteride: “Dr. Peter Greenwald, director of the Division of Cancer Prevention at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., notes that the drug finasteride could prevent about a quarter of prostate cancers from ever developing.”

Full Article: Pursuing Prevention

Best regards

Thanks for sending this. The information about finasteride reducing the incidence of certain prostate cancers is correct, but that study is based on taking 5mg of finasteride daily (Proscar, a prostate treatment). I’ve actually been writing about this for years. Propecia is 1mg finasteride and you cannot establish an exact parallel, but the inference is there.

Many experts, however, feel that the 1mg dose may have the same impact as the 5mg dose, but without proof, one can not state this as a fact. The reference to Dr. Peter Greenwald is correctly stated, but the dose was not in the quote offered.