A new insight into the mechanism behind PFS

General Discussion
#1

I think that many men have a permanent reaction to propecia however its only a smaller subset of these men that experience this reaction in a particularly negative way. The reason I say this is because I realized the other day that stories like the following are pretty common on hairloss sites:

https://www.baldtruthtalk.com/threads/24262-24-year-old-Finasteride-stopped-working.

Ive seen countless stories of guys talking about how finasteride has stopped working for them after X months/years. Whats interesting about this is that its a very similar time frame for guys that got PFS too. Many (not all) PFS guys got PFS after taking finasteride for X months/years. So basically the takeaway from this is that it appears that for many men it takes many months or maybe even a year or more for the body to begin to permanently react towards a given stimulus. In the case of some men taking finasteride their body reacts by making finasteride no longer effective and their hairloss starts again, in the case of other men it makes their bodies react by getting PFS.

I think the important thing to consider here is that we actually have a vast amount of cases where the time for permanent reactions (epigenetic shifts?) to occur is anywhere from months to a year or more. This is significant because we now have a concrete idea of how long it takes to cause an epigenetic shift. This is knowledge that we were previously unaware of but it was right under our noses so to speak. Armed with this knowledge we can possibly learn to treat PFS better due to knowing that it may take many months or even a year or more to see results by using a particular approach. I think all too often people here are prone to giving up a certain approach after only a few weeks or even a few days. I know that im certainly guilty of this. I think that if we began to adopt a more diligent and medium/long term approach then its possible that we could see positive results from different treatments which we had previously considered deadends

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#2

A lot of people with PFS get it after taking Finasteride for a short period of time.

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#3

took FIN for 3 months EOD. But agree with you, gotta stick out those protocols.

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#4

Hi @skorpio88, thanks for your theory. Could you fill out the survey, please.

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#5

yeah I mentioned that in the OP. I said that some men get PFS after taking finasteride for only a short period of time. That being said, isnt the converse also possible with men who took finasteride but didnt get PFS? By that I mean that there are probably men out there who took just a few pills of finasteride and it drastically (and permanently) increased their rate of hairloss/overall androgenicity. I can’t definitely claim that this is true, but im almost 100% sure that stories like that exist out there.

my overall point is this; there is concrete evidence for there being certain time frames over which epigenetic shifts/permanent reactions happen; this is clear by looking at how many men respond in a predictable way to finasteride after taking it for so many months or years, etc. Both PFS sufferers and men who simply stopped responding to finasteride and started balding again both fall on the same spectrum. We need to start realizing that there is most likely an identical epigenetic (?) mechanism occurring for both groups of men. The only difference is that the epigenetic shift/permanent reaction that happened in PFS sufferers happened in such a way that it triggered PFS in men who already had an underlying vulnerability to it (maybe hormone receptor ratios, hormonal system fragility, etc etc), for regular men it just increased their androgenicity and caused them to start balding again.

#6

I think people with hyperandrogenicity are a part of the puzzle, it would be interesting if we could analyze their AR density to see if the increased AR density in PFS is the cause of the disease or a downstream effect (I suspect the latter).

But in general it seems like extreme DHT ablation shocks the body and causes an epigenetic reaction, which honestly is to be expected given that this ablation is completely unnatural. This reaction seems to either increase or decrease sensitivity to androgens beyond the receptor level, to an extreme degree.

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#7

So I suffer from hyperandrogenicity. Does that mean I need to lower my androgen receptors? Do you think there is a way to get my hairloss speed and rate back to where it was pre-fin? @skorpio88