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How did you find this forum?
Googled “finasteride testicular atrophy” -
What is your current age, height, weight?
26, 6’3", 175 lbs -
Do you excercise regularly? If so, what type of excercise?
sporadically. Push-ups, sit-ups, stretching, random sports. -
What type of diet do you eat (vegetarian, meat eater, raw, fast-food/organic healthy)?
Try to eat healthy, organic, but living in rural Alaska now, so options are Chinese food or Chinese food and occasionally whale. -
Why did you take Finasteride (hair loss, BPH, other)?
hair loss -
For how long did you take Finasteride (weeks/months/years)?
7-8 months: May/June 2005 - January 2006 -
How old were you when you started Finasteride?
24 -
How old were you when you quit?
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How did you quit (cold turkey or taper off)?
cold turkey -
What type of Finasteride did you use – Propecia, Proscar, Fincar or other generic?
Propecia -
What dose did you take (eg. 1 mg/day, 1 mg every other day etc.)?
I don’t remember–either 1 mg daily or 5 mg daily. -
How long into your use of Finasteride did you notice the onset of side effects?
7-8 months -
What side effects did you experience while on the drug that have yet to resolve since discontinuation?
Put an X beside all that apply:
Sexual
[x] Loss of Libido / Sex Drive
[x] Erectile Dysfunction
[ ] Complete Impotence
[ ] Loss of Morning Erections (REDUCTION)
[ ] Loss of Spontaneous Erections (REDUCTION)
[ ] Loss of Nocturnal Erections (REDUCTION)
[x] Watery Ejaculate
[x] Reduced Ejaculate
[ ] Inability to Ejaculate / Orgasm
[?] Reduced Sperm Count / Motility
Mental
[x] Emotional Blunting / Emotionally Flat
[x] Difficulty Focusing / Concentrating
[x] Confusion
[x] Memory Loss / Forgetfullness
[x] Stumbling over Words / Losing Train of Thought
[x] Slurring of Speech
[x] Lack of Motivation / Feeling Passive / Complacency
[x] Extreme Anxiety / Panic Attacks
[x] Depression / Melancholy
Physical
[x] Penile Tissue Changes (narrowing, shrinkage, wrinkled)
[x] Penis curvature / rotation on axis
[ ] Testicular Pain
[x] Testicular Shrinkage / Loss of Fullness
[x] Genital numbness / sensitivity decrease
[x] Weight Gain
[ ] Gynecomastia (male breasts)
[x] Muscle Wastage
[x] Muscle Weakness
[ ] Joint Pain
[x] Dry / Dark Circles under eyes
Misc
[ ] Prostate pain
[x] Persistent Fatigue / Exhaustion
[ ] Stomach Pains / Digestion Problems
[ ] Constipation / “Poo Pellets”
[x] Vision - Acuity Decrease / Blurriness
[ ] Increased hair loss
[ ] Frequent urination
[x] Lowered body temperature
[x] Other (please explain)
Increased sweating?
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What (if any) treatments have you undertaken to recover from your side effects since discontinuation of the drug?
None, but planning on seeing an endocrinologist when I move back to the lower 48. -
If you have pre or post-Finasteride bloodtests, what hormonal changes have you encountered since discontinuing the drug (pls post your test results in the “Blood Tests” section and link to them in your post)?
N/A -
Anything not listed in the above questions you’d like to share about your experience with Finasteride?
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Tell us your story, in your own words, about your Finasteride usage and side effects experienced while on/off the drug.
I was put on an ACE Inhibitor in the middle of high school to reduce pressure on an aortic aneurysm through a leaky heart, malformed heart valve. I was always wary of possible side effects–days after I started the medication, I noticed a significant increase in urination. It seems ACE Inhibitors flush salts out of your body. I wondered what else they could do.
My dosage was increased at the end of high school or the beginning of college, where I met a couple of prematurely balding friends who were on Propecia. The idea of taking a drug to remedy baldness seemed appallingly silly and vain to me.
But around my junior year of college, my luxuriant tresses of hair suddenly started receding and thinning at an alarming rate. I had always figured I would start receding eventually--my maternal grandpa has kept a head of thick, white hair into his late eighties, but I didn't really believe in Old Wive's Genetics. But the men both my parents' sides who did lose hair seemed to do so gradually and gracefully over decades. In a matter of a year, it seemed to me that I was already approaching my father.
Given my suspicion of pharmaceuticals, I was quick to blame my ACE Inhibitor. I figured that had to be it. But I resigned myself to my fate, or so I thought.
After college, I taught ESL for a summer and then started law school--and I LOVED it. I was at a great school on a great campus filled with incredibly interesting and friendly members of a supportive community--not what you'd expect from law school. I was engaged, focused, energetic, involved. It was one of the happiest, most fulfilling years of my life.
While there, I discovered that one of my cousins, and undergrad at the same campus, was on Propecia. Despite having just had a terrific year and, without exaggeration, having become the most popular student--or perhaps because of that--I started thinking that I might look into Propecia, or at least broach the topic with my dermatologist. I'd noticed that, in addition to my head hair, my body hair seemed to be thinning and limping up.
Unfortunately, my dermatologist had left his practice a couple years earlier, and his patients had been taken over by a young doctor with the most frustratingly chilly bedside manner. Supposed to be my vigilant guard against skin cancer, he would give my obvious moles but a cursory glance, ignore whole regions of my body, hardly make eye contact, and breeze through an appointment in ten minutes. My mom and dad also saw him, and they felt the same way.
I tentatively ventured, "So, my hair has really thinned out in the last year or two, really quickly--"
He cut me off. "Male pattern baldness." I tried to engage him in conversation, "Ok, sure, but I'm on this medication--"
"Male pattern baldness." Well, I thought, I'd might as well play ignorant. "My mom's dad has more hair than I do!"
"What about your mom's maternal grandfather? It's male pattern baldness."
I was pretty much stunned and disgusted. I wanted to get out of there. I told him that I had a friend and a cousin on propecia, and I asked what he thought of that. He said that he could prescribe it, and asked me if I was aware of the minute risk of sexual side effects. I told him that, yes, I had looked it up online and knew that there was about a 1% risk of sexual side effects that would reverse if the medication were stopped. So he gave me the prescription.
I picked up the bottle, but left it on my desk for a couple of weeks. I was still debating it. I didn't trust pharmaceuticals, but at this point I had convinced myself that my ACE Inhibitor was responsible, and that I was just trying to balance things out. So I caved in and started.
After starting, I masturbated regularly (well, I did anyway), paying attention to any effects. I didn't notice any in the first month, so I began to relax my vigilance.
I also didn't notice any other effects, but I wasn't looking for anything other than vague "sexual side effects," which I assumed to be reversible impotence. The summer passed without event, although looking back, I might have already started experiencing some of the mental and emotional side effects. I just thought I was a lazy, unpaid summer intern.
I came back to school in the fall for my second year, and things started off fine. I went through an intense fall on-campus interview period, spoke up in my classes, participated in all sorts of extracurricular events--in short, the year was starting off like the previous one. However, right after callback interviews a month or two later, I started feeling a bit sluggish and depressed, which was unusual for me. I had always been an unreasonably happy-go-lucky guy, and while I had occasionally suffered lows, they never lasted more than a week or so. I felt myself in a bit of a rut and felt less involved in my classes. I just thought it was dissatisfaction over my uncertainty about my direction in the law--what sort of law I wanted to practice, if I did, and in what type of organization. And perhaps the summer job rat race was getting to me, I told myself. I started sleeping more, or at least feeling like I needed more sleep. Hey, I'm starting my mid-20s. That's when metabolism slows, right?
At the end of the year, I started seeing a new girlfriend. It was fairly casual--she was busy, I was busy. We were taking things at a moderate pace, not rushing into sex too quickly. A month or two into our relationship, I suddenly realized one night that I had not masturbated in a week and didn't even feel like masturbating. On each night, I had given myself the excuse that I was tired and had been too busy. But a week? I hadn't gone two full days, let alone a week, without masturbating at least once since the day I first learned how! With growing fear and awareness, I attempted to masturbate. I eventually was successful, but it took a lot of time and all of my concentration. Functionally, I realized, I was impotent.
I knew immediately what had caused it, so I quit Propecia cold turkey. I threw out the bottle. My stomach tied itself in knots. I was disgusted, mortified, humiliated.
And, of course, my girlfriend decided the next night was the time to have sex. I explained the situation to her, and she was very supportive. After all, she was a nursing student.
A week or two after I had quit Propecia, I felt my libido and erections improve. I wasn't where I'd been, but I thought I was at the start of an upswing. I was having trouble really devoting myself to my spring classes, but by that point, I had figured out the function of reward over effort in law school and found the point of maximum "profit," so it didn't seem to matter too much.
By May, a good three months after I had quit, however, I started noticing some odd things. First, my ejaculate volume began to decrease. It also seemed to change consistency a little. Instead of being fairly uniform, it seemed like it had generally become less viscous and more liquidy, but there were thicker, stickier clumps.
And then I noticed something peculiar. My testicles and scrotum did not seem to sag like they usually did. My scrotum looked like it was perpetually cold, hanging much higher than usual. My testicles, to my amusement, had always hung down in the loose hammock of my scrotum, which I enjoyed visually and in the sensations I experienced when walking and sitting. They started, however, to cling higher...and they were smaller, I suspected.
I also found out that my grandpa was on propecia to reduce his prostate size. That was when I realized the connection between finasterides and prostates--that the whole hair-thickening thing was just a potential side-effect of a prostate-shrinking drug, not the other way around.
The summer of 2006 was terrifying. I watched helpless as my testicles seemed to shrink right before my eyes and fingers. I wrote panicked e-mails to my parents, who arranged an appointment with an endocrinologist for me at the end of the summer, when I'd head back to the east coast from my summer spot in California. I wasn't sure I'd have testicles by then. Meanwhile, I was having a terrible job trying to concentrate at work. I was increasingly fatigued and foggy headed. While I was usually a gregarious fellow, I noticed I was starting to have some trouble sustaining conversations. I figured it was just a side-effect of my dissatisfaction with life as a summer associate at a law firm. I had done a more careful internet search of finasteride side effects, so I knew I was suffering some, but after my ACE Inhibitor fiasco, I was reluctant to make Propecia my scapegoat for everything that seemed wrong in my life.
The summer ended, and I finally made it to my appointment. I explained to the doctor what was going on–decreased pre-ejaculatory fluid, decreased ejaculate volume, reduced libido, atrophied testicles (which I estimated have shrunk to less than half their original size). I even submitted photos of my scrotum taken at a naked party in October 2005 and photos I had taken in May 2006 for comparison. I explained that, when aroused, I hardly felt any fullness between my anus and scrotum, whereas I used to feel a rock-hard bulge. Having no idea what that might mean, I asked that my prostate be probed to see if it was in the normal size range.
The doctor examined me and said that my testicles and prostate were within the normal size range. He then explained to me what finasteride does in the body. He said that prolonged use can actually turn off genes responsible for certain hormone production in some people, which might explain why I seemed to continue to decline after stopping. He said that, if that were the case, the genes might turn back on. Or they might not. Then he gave me a lecture on vanity, pointed to his own bald head, and stressed the foolishness of using pharmaceuticals cosmetically.
And off I went.
When I came back to campus for my last year of law school, something was off. In the past, I'd always loved meeting new people and getting to know the new first year class. This time, though, I just didn't seem to care. That's how I began to feel about a lot of things--I just couldn't be bothered. There were times when I was confronted by a situation that would ordinarily provoke some kind of response from me, some feeling, but nothing would bubble up. I knew how I was supposed to react by habit, and sometimes I did. I could feel the hint of the scent of emotion--it was as though if I could just put a little more effort into concentrating on what was going on, I might be able to make sense of it or feel something...but I was just too tired. I felt perpetually sleep-deprived, except the result was more debilitating than any of the extended sleep deprivation I subjected myself to at the beginning of college. My mood shifted dramatically--where I had been an emotional, but willful and stable and rational person, I found myself having trouble confronting my feelings, and overcome by despair more and more often. I tried blaming relationship problems, problems with the legal profession, problems with law school, insecurities over my testicular atrophy, or some combination, but at the same time, I suspected that the whole was greater than the sum of those parts. And all the while a little pudge was developing around my belly. Just growing into a lawyer's body?
At the end of the school year, I was elected to be the class speaker at graduation. It was an honor and a thrill, but try as I might to come up with something to say, I felt entirely blank on the inside. I used to write pages and pages of stream of consciousness poetry, yet here I was paralyzed by an absolute vacuum of inspiration. I knew somewhere inside was a lot of appreciation for the experience, but it kept evading my grasp, as did concrete memories of the last three years. I started to want to just sleep through the whole thing.
Fortunately, the speech ended up going fine. I had to wait, though, until the panic of extreme procrastination kicked some adrenaline and emotion into me the night before the speech. I pulled my last law school all-nighter the night before graduation and finished the speech at about 6:30 am, in time to catch about 2 hours of sleep.
Instead of taking the bar exam over the summer, I ended up having heart surgery to correct that aortic aneurysm. My ascending aorta was replaced with a dacron graft and my aortic valve was repaired. I was blessed to not be required to take blood thinners, since my valve did not need to be replaced by a mechanical device. I was put on beta blockers, though, which have similar potential side-effects including fatigue, weight gain, reduced libido, and depression.
Two months after my surgery, a month before my sternum healed, I made my way to rural Alaska for a yearlong clerkship. It's been an amazing eight months so far--it's an incredible experience up here. But I've been wracked by depression at times, both when there is 24 hrs of sunlight and 0 hours of sunlight, and in between. I've been terribly fatigued and sometimes stumbling and slurring my speech to the point of ridiculousness. I've blamed loneliness, I've blamed the beta blockers.
Because of these symptoms, my cardiologist agreed to let me reduce my beta blockers dose, first to 3/4, then 1/2, then 1/4. After that, about a month ago, I stopped taking the beta blockers entirely.
Today, more than two years after stopping Propecia cold turkey, my testicles remain atrophied. I have gone from producing almost excessive pre-ejaculatory fluid--always leaving embarrassing wet marks on my pants!--to producing virtually none. I am almost entirely dry until I ejaculate. When I do ejaculate, the volume is still greatly reduced. The division between the "liquid" and "sticky" portions of my ejaculate is more pronounced. My ejaculate is part quick liquid and part thick, sticky goop. My libido has not nearly recovered, though I can hold an erection. By mid-2006, my penis developed a curve that it never possessed, and does seem rotated a bit on its axis. I continue to experience all of the mental side effects associated with finasteride and most of the physical effects.
Granted, with my heart surgery, beta blockers, and experience in rural Alaska, several of my symptoms are multi-factorial. However, they all seem to have started before the surgery, and, coincidentally, after I started Propecia. I did not experience the full force of most of the effects until after I quit Propecial cold turkey, however.
That's more or less the story. It's great to find this community, and I wish all of us a speedy recovery.