The Journey begins

isishearmyplea · Jan 25, 2014

Hello everyone!!

Well i am 24 years old and have been receding slowly since i was 20. I was treated with steroids at around that time and thn i got my head shaved, i noticed a lot of acne on my scalp at that time and when my hair regrew, my hairline was not that strong and even the texture of hair had changed a bit ( they were more brittle, hope its the right adjective :/). My dad is slick bald on the front, his crown is still fine for his age (he is 60). Anyway as time progressed it got worse slowly and i lived in denial, thought lifestyle changes will turn things around ( as you know i was in college, lots of drugs and alcohol abuse, poor diet and i had stopped playing football(soccer) for my college).

And then last year in april i started to shed a lot, i thought it would go away but then it persisted for a long time. i read somewhere that 50-100 strands in a day is normal, and mine was roughly around 70 80, but hell even that was terrifying. Now i got really scared and started doing online research and knew a friend who was on treatments for hairloss ( found out he was on big 3 , just that it was 1 mg propecia twice in a week). As usual, initially i thought i would never touch finasteride and in the first week of sep 2013 i shaved my head and started nizoral 2% + minoxidil 2% and some vitamins and other supplements. I dunno if minoxidil did anything to my hairline, but i am still using it ( on the hairline only). Now as i see things, this male pattern baldness fight is useless without an AntiAndrogen. So i am gonna jump on finasteride in the coming week>.5mg ED,finpecia by cipla. This forum has been really helpful and i really think that i would have suffered some psychological blow had this forum not been there, you know what male pattern baldness can do to a young man

. i really thank all the posters for helping newcomers here and there a quite few senior members whom i pmd and they helped me, thanks again!!

Racially i am a mongoloid( dunno if that matters for male pattern baldness).

A few pics below

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okay the order is a bit jumbled
1st, 4th and 5th- in dec 2013 (minoxidil for 3 months)
2nd one - sept 2013 no regime ( flash kinda exaggarates the situation )
3rd one - 2010, good old days
6th one- taken yesterday

sorry for the quality of the pics, i dont have a camera and my mp3 player has a lousy camera. thanks. but i guess it ll give you guys a rough idea abt my hair.

If you have any suggestions please do chime in.

I will update in the last week of April.
Wish me luck!!

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oh and one more thing. plz rate my norwood .

thanks

GoldenMane · Feb 8, 2014

The quality of your hair varies quite a lot from picture to picture. In the second picture it looks like you have significant thinning in the anterior scalp region, but in the 6th picture your hair looks great! In fact in the fifth and sixth picture, your hairline looks like it's < Norwood 2. Somewhere between 1 and 2. Anyway, you're on the right treatments, 0.5 mg finasteride a day should be sufficient, maybe 1-2 ml minoxidil on the frontal area once or twice a day is the best way to treat male pattern baldness! If photos 3-6 are your most recent photos, then it would appear you've already responded greatly. In fact it would appear that you had great success between September and December 2013! Your frontal region recovered really well so congrats, I'd call this a real success story! Hopefully with finasteride every day you can maintain your hair for a long time!

Your hair loss had nothing to do with quitting football or drinking/partying, it's 99% genetics, everything else has very little impact.

isishearmyplea · Feb 11, 2014

GoldenMane said:
The quality of your hair varies quite a lot from picture to picture. In the second picture it looks like you have significant thinning in the anterior scalp region, but in the 6th picture your hair looks great! In fact in the fifth and sixth picture, your hairline looks like it's < Norwood 2. Somewhere between 1 and 2. Anyway, you're on the right treatments, 0.5 mg finasteride a day should be sufficient, maybe 1-2 ml minoxidil on the frontal area once or twice a day is the best way to treat male pattern baldness! If photos 3-6 are your most recent photos, then it would appear you've already responded greatly. In fact it would appear that you had great success between September and December 2013! Your frontal region recovered really well so congrats, I'd call this a real success story! Hopefully with finasteride every day you can maintain your hair for a long time!

Your hair loss had nothing to do with quitting football or drinking/partying, it's 99% genetics, everything else has very little impact.

Thanks golden mane for taking the time. Well i personally think that the pics are misleading, second pic is shot with flash and i have shorter hair, anyway i have been using mioxidil 2% for 4 months twice a day and ll reduce it to once a day. I dont think it did anything for my hairline and yes i popped my first pill yesterday

. it was .25 mg and god it was so small hehe. gonna increase it to .5 after a couple of weeks. well its foolish to say anything abt finasteride after taking it only twice but i must say nothing has happened so far. will post my pics in the evening with a better cam and i ll treat them as baseline. cheers!!