Stopping finasteride after 5 years

I’ve been taking generic finasteride for around 5 years (since I was 25) and I’ve maintained the hair that I had when I started taking it. I also only had a minor side effect (orgasms seem to be a bit weaker, not too much but enough to notice) but the plus of keeping my hair outweighed this negative.

I read a scientific paper yesterday about the long term effects of neurosteroids and 5a alpha reductase inhibitors and it got me a little worried. Then I went down the rabbit hole of posts on places like Medium and Vice about how the drug ruined their lives and it was difficult for me to get some sleep last night and I was seriously considering just going cold turkey but even there you get people saying that stopping finasteride could give you PFS symptoms as well.

Not really sure what to do now, as much as I like having my hair I don’t want to screw up my brain and body over the long term.

Currently, I’m thinking of dropping down from 1mg to 0.25mg a day as I saw a graph showing that DHT inhibition only goes from 68% to 62% but what do you think?

Almost all of my patients who were on finasteride for years and who have stopped the drug for man y reasons, have often seen significant hair loss and regretted stopping the drug.