I Had No Problems with Propecia But If I Stop It Will I Have Post-Finasteride Syndrome?
hey doctor, amazing blog helping a lot of people…
i’ve been on propecia for a 14 months with min to no result. i’m 24 now. i had no problem staying on the drug and give it another 8 months since i didn’t experience any side effect hoping to see better results, until i read about post-finasteride syndrome and it had me worried. so just needed a clear answer from you doctor before considering stopping the drug. is post-finasteride syndrome a real thing?thank you doctor
This “Post-Finasteride Syndrome” suggests that there are persistent sexual, neurological, and physical side effects for some men when they stop taking the medication (Propecia). It sounds like it’s just a fancy name to wrap around the seemingly endless list of side effects that people on the internet are attributing to finasteride. The data that is available and the information I have from my own patients doesn’t sync up with the reports on the anonymous message boards.
Much of this seems to have stemmed from the hysteria created about a year ago based on a couple of published articles about men that were recruited from a Propecia complaint forum that were interviewed about their side effects. If it sounds ridiculously biased to you, then we agree.
If I am to understand this “Post-Finasteride Syndrome” correctly, it is for those that had side effects, stopped the medication, yet the side effects persisted. If you don’t have any side effects, I don’t think this applies to you. If you want to learn more about this, here is the other side of the coin — PFS Foundation.
Well, where I live side effects that persist after discontinuation of the drug are listed in the Propecia package insert. So clearly even Merck themselves admit this to some degree.
I took the drug for 13 years without ANY side-effects. After reading those “published articles” they refer to in the answer, I became a litte worried myself. So, I decided to experiment and stop the drug for 1 month to see if this “post finasteride syndrome” were real. I am now off the drug for almost 2 years and I the terrible side-effects (that hit me around week 9 off the drug) have persisted.