I want to hear from people who started re taking finasteride. Or links to articles where this has occurred. That’s it please and thanks.
I took finasteride for 8 years. Towards the end my libido had dropped to maybe 65%. I stopped finasteride 2.5 years ago and my libido improved to around 80%. After 6 months of not taking it I started losing a lot of hair so I decided to resume finasteride for a while so I can taper off more slowly and give the androgen receptors in the hair follicles a chance to re-adjust more gradually. With the first pill of finasteride I got PFS. My libido dropped to 15%. I stopped taking it after a month but PFS symptoms never improved. In fact in the past 4 months libido has dropped to 5%.
Ok…
During my 8-year stretch on finasteride I had gradually increasing symptoms. Things were getting worse but very slowly. At the end of the period the biggest issues were lower libido, weaker erections and (!) shrunken penis. People who have this symptom would know this but let me clarify. I am not referring to smaller erections here but to smaller, thinner and lighter penis in the flaccid state, which is evidence for tissue atrophy. This effect has of course been confirmed in many rat studies. I also had other symptoms that did not bother me such as watery semen and lack of morning erections. The realization that my penis had shrunk was quite shocking when I finally figured it out and that was a major reason for my decision to quit finasteride. In other words, and this is very important, I had developed penile atrophy while on finasteride without having PFS. It must have happened gradually during the last couple of years because in the early years on finasteride I don’t think I had it. That issue has not improved at all since I stopped finasteride. In fact, I think it has gotten worse.
Yes, the second time I took it I took it for one month but I got knocked down after the first pill. I continued taking it hoping it would go away and also tried to taper off but nothing changed.
Prior to that experience I had stopped finasteride one more time a couple of years earlier for around 3 months. I had no issues while being off it or after I went back on it at the time.
It is not just one rat study. There are many. It is a proven fact that androgen deprivation leads to apoptosis (cell death) of androgen dependent tissue. If you understand biology you can read the putative mechanisms in one of the papers. Don’t forget that finasteride was developed specifically to shrink the prostate via apoptosis. The same mechanism is at work in all androgen dependent organs such as the testes, the penis, the seminal vehicles and a few others.
As for rats being a different animal - I had a debate on Reddit about this topic once. Read my comments there - I am ngc800.
The gist is this: Rat penile morphology is an appropriate model for humans. Read the comments on Reddit for more details. Also, you are right that they give animals a much higher dose but that’s normal in all animal studies for multiple reasons. First, they usually have very small sample size so in order to have significant results they need a big effect size. Second, you want to be able to model in a short time period what would happen in humans over many years and decades. Third, you want to establish the existence of an effect and its direction and let the others argue about its exact size. Nobody claims that human penises shrink as much as rat penises in these studies. Fourth, finasteride has a very non-linear dose-response function. It inhibits DHT drastically even at very low levels, such as 1mg. So going from 1mg to 100mg is not going to produce x100 of an effect, more like double digit percent increase probably.
Rats and mice are the most validated model organisms for human disease currently available to us. Outcomes of rat and mouse studies are highly predictive for what happens in humans.
Rats and mice have been the leading model organisms used in biomedical research for well over a century
Science is a complicated and challenging subject. It is always advisable to try to get up to speed on scientific topics discussed in this forum before voicing strong opinions about them.I don’t only mean this regarding your comment, but more generally speaking.
True, but androgen deprivation alone does not explain why some guys who only took finasteride for a short period (in extreme cases 1 day) suffer ongoing tissue damage even years after exposure. There is more involved here than simply the causal effect of androgen deprivation. It is more likely that androgen deprivation triggered an epigenetic effect, which leads to long term deregulation of the androgen receptor and hence androgen responsive genes. Evidence along those lines has already been found in the Di Loretto study, so this is not pure hypothesis.
True. My goal was not to try to explain PFS but to argue that even people who won’t get PFS will still suffer negative effects from finasteride.
in my opinion everybody can develop pfs. it depends on your luck. that would explain that some here like me quit the drug before with no problem. everytime you restart the drug its a new scenario. and yeah im with you : fin always harms because blocking dht has many consequences. depends on the polyphormism of your androgen receptors how much damage it cause in the long run
in my case the shrunken dick is reversible. sometimes my dick has its original size. sometimes it looks like a 3 year old kiddie dick… very strange. maybe its also dopamin related. i dont know. my point is that i dont believe this shrunken dick is irreversible. its more like no libido = small dick lool. and i know that dopamin is important for libido.