Blood test results - advice?

General Discussion
#1

I’ve been off finasteride for five weeks. Blood tests yesterday and results today. Mainly sexual side effects, problems with erections, watery ejaculate and difficult orgasming. Libido normal.

Got the following results (sorry its not a fully hormone panel, you may remember me complaining about my doctor on another post who I don’t think is very good):

Serum Testosterone 14.0 nmol/L (8.64 - 29.00) - Normal - 30 Aug 2018

Serum FSH level 2.1 iu/L (2.0 - 12.0) - Normal - 30 Aug 2018

Serum LH level 4.7 iu/L (2 - 9) - Normal - 30 Aug 2018

Serum prolactin level 342 mu/L (86 - 324) - Abnormal - 30 Aug 2018

So nothing super crazy (although this is five weeks post finasteride, they were probably worse in the preceding weeks).

However, there is a sort of trend. Testosterone (although normal) is in the bottom quartile. FSH is essentially a low result and prolactin is high (although not crazily) high. I don’t have pre-Fin blood tests I’m afraid. But Finasteride has clearly screwed around with my androgen producing pathways.

In light of my symptoms and the above results, do you guys think it might be contributing towards the sexual side effects? Just wondering what my next step should be. I don’t know who to go to now - Urologist or Endocrinologist?

I want to be cautious. Don’t necessarily want to try loads of medicines to correct this and mess me up further. Probably test again in a few weeks and see if they are all moving in the right direction. But I do want to discuss these with a specialist to make sure I get the best advice.

Any thoughts chaps would be awesome. Thanks again for your support!

#2

PFS and Blood Hormone levels appear totally un-related…Usually free testosterone levels are all that is really low or off…My levels didn’t move much at all through the entire process and “crash” following stopping finasteride…I suspect the crash is probably the increasing and up-regulation of AR that seems to continue on and on after stopping the drug and also the fact melcangi saying that dht no longer functions in the body as before.

#3

Prolactin is super high.

However, list your symptoms here asw.
How do you react to increasing levels of testo?
Any dht results?

If somebody really wants to cure pfs, he needs comprehensive testing. Check my posts. With curing coexistent diseases you can cure pfs. That’s it. I compared thousands of posts and all credible recovery stories.

Unfort.ppl don’t get anywhere by only doing bloodtests. I can tell that thousands times but it seems ppl are quite okay.

#4

Not sure if this is the right place to discuss, however @holyhead mentioned that his crash was most likely due to up-regulation of 5AR which seems to be irreversible.

In a paper published in 2017 on NCBI regarding the use of 5AR inhibitors in treatment of benign prostatic hyperpasia (enlarged prostate) the mechanisms of 5AR inhibition are CLEARLY stated to act as irreversible ihibitors of 5AR, and that dutasteride inhibits both type 1 and type 2, while fin only inhibits type 2. It also mentions that dutasteride is 45 times more potent inhibitor of 5AR1 and 2.5 more potent in inhibiting 5AR2.

Amazing how available this information is, yet they continue to make billions on this medication.