In the News – Finasteride May Reduce Interest in Drinking Alcohol?
Snippet from the article:
Some men who take the drug finasteride (Propecia) to slow a receding hair line may also find it reduces their interest in drinking alcohol, new research reveals.
Almost two-thirds of the men in the study noticed they were drinking less alcohol than before taking Propecia, said study researcher Dr. Michael Irwig, an endocrinologist and assistant professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine.
But the decrease in drinking seen in the study may not be found in all men who use the popular hair-loss treatment. (A higher dose of finasteride is also prescribed to men for an enlarged prostate, and is sold as Proscar.)
The study, which was aimed at better understanding the drug’s sexual side effects, looked at only younger men, ages 46 and under, who had quit taking the medication for male-pattern hair loss for at least three months, yet continued to experience effects such as a reduced sex drive and erectile dysfunction.
Read the rest — Baldness Drug Curbs Men’s Interest in Alcohol, Study Suggests
The study was of 83 men that claimed to have persistent sexual side effects after stopping finasteride, with 65% of them stating they drank less booze now, 32% stating no change in their drinking, and 3% stating they drank more.
I’m not sure if the study looked into the personal lives of these men to find out if there were other possible reasons for their drinking habits to change (lifestyle or psychological), but the findings were worth posting here. The study is fairly ambiguous about whether alcohol and finasteride are definitively linked, and the article points out that there was no control group. For what it’s worth, I don’t recall any patients ever mentioning a change in alcohol consumption to me.
Past studies by the same researcher, Dr Irwig, have been written about here before.
It’s always somewhat irritating when every aspect of a study is used to indicate causation. Surely you could ask any group of men with a lower libido and discover some stopped drinking in case it affected their sexual ability?
And this study would also be on men who weren’t taking propecia any longer. So perhaps it could state that propecia CAUSED increased alcohol intake? Which was then reversed when they ceased use.
That’s the problem with ambiguous, uncontrolled studies that rely solely on individual subjective response. I know they get into the literature too but most of us would see these as about as accurate as magazine surveys…
LOL since everybody here basically thinks these effects are in their head, wouldn’t you expect them to drink MORE alcohol to drown their demons?
I can’t say it better than Paul. As someone who has
been a clinical trialist (MD/PhD) for over 20 years,
my perception of this work from this single investigator
is that it is just a continuation of the uncontrolled, “piloty”, speculative
research that is too common in this field. Pilot studies are sometimes
OK if they are presented as such but this type of work
(and many of the studies in this less than stellar journal)
are very suboptimal.