I wanted to ask this, and similar tbh. Just because I have a real fixation on it, would there even be any merit in doing as I did and NYScientitst did and taking eg sulforaphane or even rosemary or something to destroy ARs, and have them re-grow anew? WILL they/do they regrow anew even? And maybe in balance? I felt MARKEDLY better after a few huge doses of BroccoMax.
DON’T take sulforaphane though ppl, it’s allegedly made folks WAY WORSE.
@axolotl - sorry to do the summoning thing to you. Really hoping for an opinion on this, it has definitely done me some good. I’ve read and understood your cautions on anti-androgens, and note well (just repeating it here now in case anyone reading this attempts this) there have been suicides from people getting worse after taking anti-androgens…
…But would it be a reasonable thing to try? Destory the ARs as best we can and ‘level the playing field’ as it were, then take nothing and see if they rebuild? I myself just don’t know IF they rebuild, or how long it’d take, but as I can tolerate tribulus better now following suforaphane, would it stand to reason I’d destroyed some ARs and gone some way to reset this balance?
Someone steer me right on this thinking? Please god though nobody take anything off the back of this speculation!
Androgen receptor are genes have the instructions to make a protein called androgen receptor.
Ligand can turn on AR gene.
In this case the saponin that tribulus contain is the ligand.
So far make sense the tribulus recovery, but I also believe that it is dosage dependent.
If for real tribulus increase AR density in the brain some how it is telling to the gene to produce more receptors protein.
It mean that tribulus saponin interact with the gene.
Gene repression is switching off of individual genes.
Gene repression is distinct from gene silenced.
NAC [N-Acetyl-cysteine] treatment induced a significant fall in T levels and in free androgen index values
Capsaicin causes inactivation and degradation of the androgen receptor
The other two are synthetic substances with no relevant published research, at least what I could quickly find. Just be careful of making claims about the safety of certain substances without doing your homework first. I would like to avoid guys landing in this forum in the future because they read your post and thought those substances were safe. Since hairloss (AGA) has been shown to be an androgen mediated process, it is likely that any treatment to mitigate it will have some form of anti-androgenic effect, and therefore cannot be considered safe. You might also want to consider this for your own case.
As you can imagine I’m very often messaged privately and publicly to comment on this and that. I have very limited time to spend due to my health and the effort of running the site and our projects. I am working very hard with awor’s help on a paper, for which the intended audience is scientists, however we will share it in some way with the community as I am sure this will be at least interesting to some members. I would expect it will provide a lot of context which will likely be able to inform your thoughts and questions regarding this area. I do wish I could go faster but it is not trivial. I’m hoping it will be ready not too long after the coming research.
@awor As I already stated I had hoped to avoid delving into hair loss topics on this thread precisely due to potential discussions such as this, and the only reason why I even brought up the things I use is due to you explicitly having asked me. It should also be known that I am not advising anyone to do what I do and I would also hope that people have the common sense to do their due research before taking any kind of advice from a random online person or statement as a fact.
Now having said that, I feel like I have to provide my own input to this since you decided to call me out for making claims, even though you seem to have done at most a 5 minute cursory google search on each compound.
Magnesium Ascorbyl Phosphate - is a water soluble form of Vitamin C (ascorbic acid). It is widely used in cosmetics and has no known anti-androgen properties of any kind, in any form. What it does, is that it can inhibit DKK-1, a protein that is extremely bad for hair and is found to be upregulated by DHT in balding people. (Several studies available on this on Google)
N-Acetyl Cysteine - the study you linked was done on women with PCOS. PCOS is a female disorder of which one of the primary hallmarks is higher than normal testosterone (for a woman). NAC in this study was shown to reduce testosterone in these women. The only thing you can conclude from this study, is that in women with PCOS, NAC may potentially normalize excess levels of testosterone. You cannot infer that it would have any effect on reducing testosterone levels of a healthy male. Now, let’s actually take a look at a study done on MEN:
After NAC treatment, patients’ sperm count and motility increased significantly whereas abnormal morphology, DNA fragmentation and protamine deficiency showed significant decreases compared to pre-treatment levels ( P < 0.05). Hormonal profile improvement was associated with lowered FSH and LH levels and increased amount of testosterone ( P < 0.05).
Capsaicin - is a substance commonly found in hot peppers. The dose I am currently using is 1 mg / 30 mL, which is a concentration of meager 0.00333% (topical creams of 0.075% are commonly used in pain management). If you think that a daily dose of 0.1 mg capsaicin topically is a problem for your androgens, I certainly hope you never eat any hot peppers or any foods that use them as condiment, because the levels can be much more significant than that.
Hot chillies showed the highest concentration of capsaicin (4249.0 ± 190.3 μg/g) and the highest pungency level (67984.60 SHU), whereas green peppers had the lowest detected concentration (1.0 ± 0.9 μg/g); green peppers, red peppers and yellow peppers were non pungent. The mean consumption of peppers for Riyadh city population was determined to be 15.5 g/person/day while the daily capsaicin intake was 7.584 mg/person/day.
Surely they must all be infertile in Riyadh, right? Well actually, the city has a population of 5 million. And if you’re still worried about capsaicin, I have some bad news for you. Did you know that unsaturated fatty acids, those healthy Omega-3’s and 6’s, are actually very strong 5-AR inhibitors? It’s true:
Nearly every single human being eats dozens of grams of them daily, so if they performed the same in the human body as they do in a dish, we’d all be goners. My point is, you can’t take a study done on prostate cancer cells in a Petri dish and extrapolate it to in vivo.
Sandalore - The only one where I will actually agree with you, insofar that it has not been researched thoroughly. It has been available as a scent for a long time but it’s research in long term human exposure is limited, and while there doesn’t seem to be any evidence pointing to anti-androgen action, it is not excluded. You would be wise to approach with caution until more data is available.
Now without detouring this thread any further, I will just state my position once more as someone who has used very many anti-androgenic substances in the past, some of them quite harsh (RU58841, enzalutamide, darolutamide, r,s-equol) and am very prone to their side effects, I do not get any such negative effects from the ones mentioned in my original message. As I have stated, my goal is to find an approach that allows me (and others, hopefully) to both keep my hair AND regain my health. I wouldn’t really be using something that would damage me on a daily basis, after the lessons I learned from Finasteride.
As a final DISCLAIMER: I am not making any claims regarding the safety of any compounds mentioned in this thread for anyone other than myself. I am not recommending anyone to buy, take, use or experiment with any of the aforementioned compounds, and if you do so, you do entirely at your own risk, and I will not be held responsible. It is up to everyone to do their own research on any potential supplements or topicals.
Once more I apologize for making such a huge off-topic message, but I had to clarify my position.
To be clear, this isn’t relevant to what @awor said. What he said was to be careful making claims about certain substances and safety, and provided resources suggesting the contrary of what you said here:
This is demonstrably not the case as your large post is presenting your interpretation as to the relevance of, and additional literature regarding, hormonal modulation by those substances.
That’s certainly a fearsome selection of antiandrogens you’ve taken, and you’re therefore much luckier than some of us. However, it’s important to remember certain people are far more susceptible to hormonal effects, even of certain foods such as those you mention, after developing PFS (which thankfully the rhetorical population of Riyadh are not experiencing). It’s not really necessary to try and create a different point of contention for the sake of it - it’s just something we ask regarding declarative claims. From our point of view running a patient support site, we prefer that things are presented with less certainty if they are debatable or not correct, as there have been significant examples of users experiencing harm from suggestions and it’s always best to mitigate as much risk as we can when it’s easily done with an “I think” or such like. Thanks and best.
Again, the question is, Our AR are upregulated or down regulated ? This is a very important question.
If tribulus increase density of AR it mean upregulation.
No always too much mean that is good.
Your question has already been answered years ago in the 2014 Di Loreto study on PFS patients.
These were the findings:
Percentage of epithelial cells (basal cells of
the epidermis) positive for nuclear AR was higher in cases
(mean6SD, 80.668.63%) than in controls (mean6SD,
65.0619.1%), P= 0.043. Stromal cells in cases showed an almost
2-fold greater expression of AR in the nuclei compared to controls
(mean6SD, 40.0615.1% in cases versus 23.468.68% in controls),
P =0.023. Percentage of AR positive vessel smooth muscle cells
did not differ between the 2 groups. The average of AR positive
cells in the 3 kind of tissues was higher in cases than in controls,
P =0.007
Why AR overexpression is probably playing a key role in our disease has been discussed many times.
Further raising AR or activating it through T/DHT is likely to make you feel worse, though in PFS, there are always exceptions. More severe PFS cases appear to often get worse following androgenic treatments, while certain milder cases (as in mainly some sexual side effects) may benefit.
So if my main symptom is insomnia with some muscle tightness/loss and minor sexual sides, would I likely feel worse or benefit with raising AR through T/DHT?
Could you expand on what you mean by a severe versus mild case of PFS in more detail? Possibly illuminating on biological differences that might differentiate one from the other.
I went from 160lbs running 10ks and working 10hr days on construction sites to 260lbs and unable to mow my own yard…The condition can cripple you, physically and mentally…
It’s like I said: Milder cases have a reduced symptoms scope, typically mainly sexual sides, and more severe cases present with many symptoms at a severe level. One of the objectives of our survey is to better characterize the various clusters within PFS. If you haven’t taken it yet, please do.
That is the six billion dollar question. If we are out of this world lucky, we might get some insight into this when we get around to correlating survey data with GWAS data. What is pretty well established though:
It is pretty safe to assume that the susceptibility to get PFS is predicted by multiple genes. Depending on how these mix and match, the person will be more or less severely affected, or not at all. In genetics, this is also known as a complex trait.
Anyone know where I can get MediHerb Tribulus for a normal price? Trying to re-up my supply but this brand has jumped to around $90 on Amazon.
The first cycle actually seems to have shifted my baseline in a positive direction. Don’t want to speak too soon but I want to try one more cycle to be sure. As op stated, it’s about doing multiple cycles to have best chance of effect.
