Best Way To Take Propecia In Terms Of Dosage?

Baldingbob123456 · Feb 20, 2019

I decided to take propecia or any form of it. First off, what even is the best form? Propecia, dutasteride, proscar... anything you guys can suggest? Also, at what dosage do you reccomend that I take let’s say propecia? Like should I cut up the pill and take a faction if it everyday? Take a full pill every other day? Every three days? I’m new to all this and want to be as effecient as possible to save money. Any science behind this that you all know, feel free to explain.

Maave · Feb 21, 2019

Search "finasteride inhibition curve" if you want studies. Here's the chart:

As you can see, finasteride effectiveness maxes out very quickly. 1mg is the normal dose but you can take 0.25mg-0.5mg with nearly full effectiveness to save money. These are averages, some people respond less, so 0.5mg is a safer bet. Taking more than 1mg is a waste. Many people get cheap 5mg pills and split them into 4x 1.25mg doses which is also fine. There shouldn't be any difference between name-brand or generic.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8846625

The terminal elimination half-life (t1/2z) is 4.7 to 7.1 hours; but despite this, slow accumulation occurs with multiple doses.
...
Doses below 0.5 mg/day do not produce much suppression of DHT levels, and doses above 5 mg/day have little additional benefit. A single dose of finasteride suppresses serum DHT levels for up to 4 days, longer than would be expected from the serum terminal elimination half-life (t1/2z) of the drug: this is probably due to the high affinity that finasteride has for the 5 alpha-reductase enzyme.

Based on that info I think that 1mg every other day should be similar to 0.5mg every day.

If you need more than 70% inhibition then you'll need dutasteride. Dutasteride has a whopping 5 week half life so you can easily take a higher-dose pill on a longer interval - however drugs with a long half life take longer to build up systemically so consider taking full dose for the first few weeks. Here's duta's inhibition curve [source study]. 0.5mg is nearly max inhibition.