How much Propecia are you guys taking?

I am just turning 24 in a couple of weeks, and although I don’t really have what you could call a hair loss problem, the hair around my temples is slowly receading and whilst it is hardly noticable, I can tell that within 3 year it probably will be, as my brother’s is more noticable and he is 2 years and 2 months older than me.

Is it worth me taking Proscar at my age with very little hair loss but a loss which will accumulate soon? If I take Proscar and it stops the loss, if I came off the stuff years later, would my hair line recead very quickly back to where it would naturally be, by that time, if I had never started taking the stuff?

How safe is taking this stuff and are there any noticable side effects? Or unnoticable but scientifically documented side effects?

Proscar is a 5 mg tablet of finasteride used in the treatment of benign prostatic hypertrophy. You wouldn’t want to take that much for hair loss. Propecia is the name of the 1 mg tablet. We talk about Proscar only because it’s the same drug, but less expensive, when cut into quarters for daily dosing. Just wanted to make that clear since you used Proscar in your question.

The official web site has a lot of information: propecia.com . There are minor side effects such as decreased ability to get an erection, but they occur in less than 2% of men who take the drug. I’ve never had erectile dysfunction while on it.

I imagine if you start early you’ll have a greatly reduced amount of loss. If you stopped your loss would start again, but I doubt it would be accelerated. (I do not know everything there is to know about this drug. Go to the web site and write to the manufacturer to be certain.)

These generic drugs are the real deal…not made in someone’s basement in Mexico or who knows where else…is it somewhat professional?

In general all this stuff is produced in Asia (India and Pakistan). Its regular industrial standard. It’s funny to see that people think “It’s cheaper, must be less quality”. With pharma products it doesn’t work this way. The research is the expensive part, not the production. By violating patents the companies selling generics save the research costs of years. Still they are fully able to produce the substances. And with Propecia and Proscar you can see that the price is not production cost driven, because it’s one and the same company pricing the same substance different for different purposes.

Those having access to newsgroups might want to read recent threads in:

alt.support.impotence

about finasteride. Several men there believe they’ve had long-term, perhaps permanent, erectile and libido problems from taking finasteride. I don’t know if there’s any real scientific basis for this claim.

It is a known side effect, but permanent?

The difficulty is that if impotence/libido issues begin (and they don’t always on these products), many men using hair restorestation compounds like Propecia have great difficulty getting back on an even keel - months to years. Hormonal levels shift. Counteractive testosterone replacement therapies result in conversions to sub-estrogens which are very complicated in their management.