Anyone Experiment With Micro-dosing Finasteride?

[Tanuge]

The reason I ask is that I’m thinking of cutting down and maybe even getting off of it- not because of the sides; my experience with it has been pretty good: good hair, no sides. I’m just not sure that I want to stay on it forever.

I just turned 50, and I’ve been on finasteride for about five years. I think I’ve made peace with losing my hair (he said smoothly with a current cool hair style). But, I don’t want to lose it all at once. I know that it’s advisable to taper down to minimize the risk of crash-problems, but I’m curious about tapering to try to make the hair loss smoother.

When I started five years ago, I was around a Norwood IV, but now I’m probably around a III/ vertex, although I’m lucky in that a Sicilian ancestry has given me curly, almost kinky black hair so a thin layer of finasteride-hair makes my bald spot almost unnoticeable.

Anyway, I’d really appreciate any feedback from guys who have quit finasteride:

How long would it take for my hair to go to “normal”?
Is it possible to gradually ease off so I don’t lose all of my hair at once?
Anyone go with the 0.25 mg dose?

Do a lot of guys think they’re fine with going back to “normal” only to find themselves popping the pills again when the loss starts?

 

[JohnOKelly]

I've not come off finasteride, but I'd be concerned that you may quickly regret this if you lose your gains. You went from a IV to a IIIV, that's great progress, was that with finasteride alone? If your only problem is popping a pill every day, it's not that much of a big deal is it really? My opinion, and this is just my opinion, I wouldn't stop the finasteride.

 

[Tanuge]

I've not come off finasteride, but I'd be concerned that you may quickly regret this if you lose your gains. You went from a IV to a IIIV, that's great progress, was that with finasteride alone? If your only problem is popping a pill every day, it's not that much of a big deal is it really? My opinion, and this is just my opinion, I wouldn't stop the finasteride.

That is a concern of mine. I wonder if I've just come to take for granted the fact that my hair stays the same now. I remember when I started finasteride. I'd been a long-haired, pony-tailed hippy for pretty much my entire adult life, and I had no idea that I was balding until I did the make-over thing. I was pretty freaked out, tried different things (tricomin, laser comb) although I probably didn't give them enough time before I brought out the "big guns."

It seems easy now to say it doesn't matter as much- I have a good girlfriend who says she doesn't care if I go bald or not (who knows) and I'm 50 years old. I see the guys on this board who are going bald in their 20s and I'd be pretty freaked out too if I were that young.

I know the lag time of finasteride's effect on the hair is really long, so "fine-tuning" a reversion to my "normal" hair has to be tricky.

 

[nate30]

It's not easy to taper off in any meaningful fashion as .25mg has almost the same DHT inhibition (60%) as the full 1mg (70%). You'd need to get below the .1mg range would could be difficult to manage with just a pill splitter. Also I believe the drug's half life is 6 hours, so you'd have substantially less left in your system at the <.1mg dose as compared to 1mg, which would result in your hormones bouncing around even with a daily dose.

 

[JohnOKelly]

That is a concern of mine. I wonder if I've just come to take for granted the fact that my hair stays the same now. I remember when I started finasteride. I'd been a long-haired, pony-tailed hippy for pretty much my entire adult life, and I had no idea that I was balding until I did the make-over thing. I was pretty freaked out, tried different things (tricomin, laser comb) although I probably didn't give them enough time before I brought out the "big guns."

It seems easy now to say it doesn't matter as much- I have a good girlfriend who says she doesn't care if I go bald or not (who knows) and I'm 50 years old. I see the guys on this board who are going bald in their 20s and I'd be pretty freaked out too if I were that young.

I know the lag time of finasteride's effect on the hair is really long, so "fine-tuning" a reversion to my "normal" hair has to be tricky.

To be honest, I really can't see any reason to taper down unless you are experiencing sides. It doesn't sound to me that you are completely certain you are ok with the idea of losing more hair so are you sure you want to take the risk that you might regret this?

 

[Tanuge]

It's not easy to taper off in any meaningful fashion as .25mg has almost the same DHT inhibition (60%) as the full 1mg (70%). You'd need to get below the .1mg range would could be difficult to manage with just a pill splitter. Also I believe the drug's half life is 6 hours, so you'd have substantially less left in your system at the <.1mg dose as compared to 1mg, which would result in your hormones bouncing around even with a daily dose.

Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that.