This abstract makes little to no sense to me. Can anybody post a link to the full study, or at least explain these details to me?
The first question I have is how did they obtain this sample? They said they studied 78 patients who exhibit PFS symptoms, but then also say these 78 were given ASEX and AMS questionnaires before they took finasteride. How on earth did they know that these 78 men would exhibit PFS symptoms before they took finasteride? Did they actually enroll thousands of men, measure their baseline sexual and hormonal scores, and then re-measure the ones that exhibited PFS symptoms after? If this is the case, they didn’t mention it.
One other possibility is that the men may have been asked to recall what they remember their pre-finasteride baseline was for these questionnaires.
My second question is what happened to the hormonal scores? They also say that hormonal values were taken before these men even touched finasteride, but the results only mention the scores of the ASEX questionnaire (and on that note, what of the AMS one?)
I feel I have to keep mentioning this so that nobody jumps up my *** about it; I think it’s fantastic that we are finally seeing studies done on this condition. However, studies need to be kept at a high quality in order to obtain accurate, useful information. Based solely on this abstract, there appear to be several important details that need to be clarified before any useful data can be obtained.
