The DHT Culprit

It isn’t testosterone which makes your hair fall out.  Rather, hair loss occurs when an enzyme turns testosterone into a different natural chemical, 5α-Dihydrotestosterone, or DHT for short.  In men, about 5% of all testosterone gets converted into DHT.  So, the more testosterone you have, the more DHT you are likely to have.

DHT is primarily found in the scalp and prostate gland.  High levels of DHT are what make your hair follicles die.  DHT also is responsible for prostate enlargement, a problem which afflicts many men and leads to symptoms like urinary difficulties. DHT can also lead to prostate cancer.

How Propecia Stops Hair Loss

Propecia is the brand name for the drug Finasteride.  It was originally approved by the FDA for treating enlarged prostate but later approved for treating male pattern baldness.  The way that Propecia works is by blocking the enzyme which turns testosterone into DHT.  Without DHT to impact hair follicles, hair loss stops and hair grows back thicker.

In order to get results from Propecia, the medicine must be taken regularly.  Unfortunately, men will need to continue taking Propecia even after their hair has grown back if they want to keep results.  If men stop taking Propecia, all regrown hair will likely fall out again within the next year.

Propecia has shown to be very effective in treating male pattern baldness.  Most men notice that their hair is thicker within a month or two of taking Propecia.  It is important to note that Propecia does cause what is known as a “shedding” period.  During this period, men notice that their hair seems to be falling out at an alarming rate. They shouldn’t worry though – this is a sign that the medicine is working.

When Propecia starts working, it will make stronger, thicker hairs grow in the follicles.  In order for these new hairs to grow, they will have to push out the older, weaker hairs.  These old, weak hairs will fall out, causing the shedding.  Soon afterwards, men will notice that their hair has grown back thicker.

What You Should Know before Taking Propecia

Propecia is highly effective in treating male pattern baldness and considered very safe.  However, there are some risks of side effects, like abnormal ejaculation and troubles getting an erection.  Before you take Propecia, you should always talk to your doctor about the risks and familiarize yourself with which ones may be cause for concern.

While Propecia is very effective for treating male pattern baldness, it is not meant for women.  Female baldness is much more complicated than male pattern baldness.  Propecia could have severe adverse effects on certain women so it should only be used as directed by men.

Once you lose your hair, it will never come back

Over the years, there have been many treatments for hair loss but they have all been ineffective.  Propecia is the only advancement to come out of hair loss studies.  The hair loss drug, which was approved by the FDA for treating baldness in 1992, blocks an enzyme which causes hair follicles to shrink.  Men taking Propecia can stop further hair loss and experience regrowth of lost hair.

Wearing a hat will make you go bald

The basis of the myth is that a hat will cut off circulation to your scalp and lead to hair loss.  But your hat would have to be incredibly tight to cut off blood flow to hair follicles. If there were truth to this myth, then men who notoriously wear hats frequently (like athletes) would have more hair loss than other men who don’t wear hats.

Hair loss is a sign of aging

Hair loss can happen to men even when they are in their teens or 20s. The bad news is that, the earlier that hair loss strikes you, the more bald you are likely to become.  The good news is that Propecia is most effective when used in young men who are just starting to lose their hair.

Male pattern baldness comes from the mother’s side

Male pattern baldness does have a genetic factor but it is not just limited to the mother’s side.  You can get the condition from your father’s side too.

Using hair products can make you go bald faster

Hair products like gel or hair spray can damage or weaken your hair.  This can make it seem like your hair is thinning.  However, hair products will not make your hair fall out any faster.

If you cut your hair, it grows back thicker and faster

When you cut your hair, it seems like it is growing back thicker.  This is only because the root of the hair is so much thicker than the ends of a strand.  If you let the cut hair grow out to its previous length, you will see it is not any thicker.  It only seems like it is growing faster because you can notice the growth better.

Combing or brushing your hair can lead to baldness

Combing or brushing can damage your hair, but it isn’t going to harm the hair follicles and lead to male pattern baldness.  By comparison, combing is less damaging than brushing but neither will make a difference for preventing baldness.

As soon as I got out of high school, I started looking for colleges where you could study something that has to do with TV. Soon, I decided that I was more interested in the technical stuff than in standing in front of the cameras myself. I finished the school for a sound engineer and I soon got a job at the local TV station which was in dire need of technical staff. However, not long after I got the job there, a producer noticed me and he asked me if I ever considered stepping to the other side and becoming a news anchor. She told me I had the face and the voice. I was at that point in my life when you try new things and I said I would try it.

It has now been almost 35 years that I have been presenting news on our local station and I even refused a couple of offers to move to a bigger station. I married my high school sweetheart and we stayed in our old neighborhood. It was going great all those years. It was a job I loved and that I wouldn’t change for the world. However, about three years ago, a great shadow started looming over my career. You will probably think it is silly, but I started getting bald. I knew my family and I knew it wouldn’t take long before I really start losing hair rapidly. And as a news anchor, it is best to keep years at bay for as long as possible.

I went to my doctor and he told me that there is something I could try. He prescribed Propecia to me. He told me to stick with it, even if I don’t see improvement in the first month or two. And I did. I was determined to keep my job and to keep presenting the news. After about three or four months, I started noticing that my hair was falling out less and less. In about half a year, it completely stopped falling out and I even started noticing some of my old hair growing back. It was nothing extreme, but it did wonders for my self-esteem.

I have been using Propecia ever since and I am not even considering giving it up. I have even recommended it to a few of my friends who are also starting to lose their hair. A few of them teased me quite a lot because of it, but most of them understood that I was doing it because of my job. This way I know I will be able to keep my job until it is time for me to retire.

Of course, at the time, I wasn’t interested in Propecia because my hair was quite thick and it didn’t look like I would have problems with hair loss. However, I soon realized that things are not always as they seem. Some things can trick you and apparently, my thick hair tricked me into believing that I would have no problems with hair loss, especially not while I was young. Unfortunately, soon after I turned 26, I noticed that the back of my head looked a lot different than a year before that. My hair was much thinner and I instantly knew how I would end up eventually if I didn’t do something.

Naturally, my choice was Propecia, not only because my uncle had a great experience with it, but because I learned online that there was an army of men quite happy with it. In my mind, this product seemed as a perfect solution.

Only about seven or eight months later, I can really tell the difference. The hair on the back of my head is not as thick as it was once, but it is definitely getting thicker and I’m sure that it would have been quite the opposite if I hadn’t done something in order to prevent hair loss.

Without Propecia, I might have ended up bald even though I’m not even in my thirties. This would have been extremely devastating and I’m convinced that this would make me feel a lot older and unattractive. Now that I have something on my side to help me successfully battle hair loss, I no longer worry about being bald.

However, as I grew older, things started changing a lot. I gained more weight and a couple of years ago, I started dealing with hair loss. At the time, these changes didn’t have any kind of effect on me because I was married and convinced that my wife loved me no matter what. In my opinion, looking great was necessary only when you wanted to make a great impression. Since I had no need for making great impressions (I was already married and had basically everything I wanted), I didn’t worry too much about the change in my appearance. I thought that these changes were inevitable and I thought that they were an integral part of growing old.

Unfortunately, I soon realized that you should never take things for granted. When my wife decided that we should separate, I have to admit that I was unpleasantly surprised because I thought that there was nothing wrong with our relationship. How I failed to notice that there was something wrong is beyond me, but I guess that my ignorance had something to do with my wife leaving me. Luckily, as much as I loved my wife, it turned out that I wasn’t as devastated as I thought I would be. Although I was kind of nervous because I didn’t know what was ahead of me, I was looking forward to dating. But there was one problem.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized that I changed a lot and this time, I did care about my appearance because once again, I had to make a great first impression. Unfortunately, I felt that there was no way I could make a great first impression because women are not that keen on bit overweight, bald guys.  Of course, I wasn’t completely bald, but it was evident that I was getting there. Something needed to be done, the only problem was that I didn’t really know what to do. Sure, I did kind of know what to do in order to lose weight, but I had no idea what to do about my hair.

Fortunately, not long after I started thinking about my options, I heard about Propecia and just how much this product can help. Determined to do something about my appearance, I ordered the product and I couldn’t wait for it to arrive because I wanted to improve my appearance as soon as possible.

I have to say that the only thing that I didn’t really like about Propecia is the fact that I needed to wait long in order to see the first results. But compared to a hair transplant procedure, which I heard was extremely painful, waiting was not such a big deal. However, after only three months, I could notice the first changes and that is when I knew that Propecia was definitely the right choice for me.

Not long after I noticed the first results, I started feeling much more confident because I knew that there was a strong chance that I might get my looks back and that was all I needed. When I felt that I looked good enough, I started dating.

Now, even though I’m still not finished with using Propecia (I feel that there is much more than this product can do for me), I think that I look decent and it turned out that I make a good first impression. This product did not only help me get my hair back, but it helped me boost my confidence a lot and move on with my life.

The story starts back in 1974, when a scientist called Julianne Imperato-McGinley from Cornell was speaking at a conference held in New York that was concerned with birth defects. Her report was on a certain group of children from Caribbean which were born sexually ambiguous at birth, at least at first glance. As such, they were raised as if they were girls, until puberty when they started developing male genitalia and other characteristics of the male gender. These children shared a certain genetic mutation which resulted in deficiency of 5-alpha reductase and dihydrotestosterone. Later in life, it was discovered that these individuals had much smaller prostates and that they also never suffered from male pattern baldness.

This presentation found its way to chief of research of Merck back then, P. Roy Vagelos who then dedicated the next two decades to trying to produce these same results with a drug. He wanted to produce this deficiency in 5-alpha reductase and DHT in order to treat enlarged prostate.

He made this happen and in 1992, his new drug, finasteride got approved for treatment of enlarged prostate and it was called Proscar. It came in doses of 5 mg. In 1997, the company got approval for a smaller formulation of finasteride of only 1 mg and it was introduced as treatment for male pattern baldness. This is how we got Propecia.

As you can see, medications are sometimes developed by actually trying to mimic a certain deficiency and a medical condition and they sometimes follow a very strange and interesting path.

On paper, these products sound amazing. They all contain nothing but natural ingredients and all of these ingredients have been used for centuries by different cultures in order to slow down or reverse hair loss in men. They are completely safe, they have absolutely no side effects and they work just as pharmaceutical drugs such as Propecia, if not better than those drugs. Who could ask for more, right?

Well, the only problem here is that this is simply not true. Okay, these products may be 100% natural and they might have been used for millennia by different cultures in the world. They might also be perfectly safe and side-effects free (which is always a question since they are not approved by any regulatory agency before they can be sold), but the simple fact is that they do not work.

They all sell some lines about their products nourishing the follicles and stuff like that. However, there is one thing that is so obviously missing from all of these claims and different websites promoting these products. Namely, you cannot find any data to back all this up. You are given some percentages that you are supposed to believe at face value.

On the other hand, there is Propecia. It is a proper medication that has been tested and approved by the FDA and innumerable other agencies from all over the world. Its efficiency has been proven and you can find plenty about it on the internet. It was also found to be safe or otherwise it wouldn’t have been approved. It is only necessary to look beyond pure advertising and look for some data.

The mechanism of action of Propecia is hidden in the name of the class it belongs to – 5-alpha reductase inhibitors. The inhibitor part stands for preventing the functioning of something, in this case 5-alpha reductase. However, in order to understand how Propecia works and why this is so important, we need to explain what 5-alpha reductase does and how it is involved in hair loss. The story goes like this.

Testosterone is a male hormone and in men it is produced both in testicles and adrenal glands. It is then transported throughout the body by sex hormone binding globulin, or SHBG. In different parts of the body, testosterone is released from SHBG and it enters different cells there in order to play a certain role. However, in some of the tissues in the body, testosterone is converted in another hormone called dihydrotestosterone, from here on DHT.

DHT is a much more potent androgen than testosterone and it has a more pronounced androgenic activity. This activity is manifested differently in different areas in the body. For instance, in the prostate, it leads to enlargement of the tissue, which as a result can have enlarged prostate. In the scalp tissue, it causes deterioration of the follicles of the hair, reducing their life span and making the hair fall out more rapidly, while also reducing further hair growth.

In order for this conversion from testosterone to DHT to happen, an enzyme is necessary and the name of this enzyme is 5-alpha reductase. What Propecia does is it binds to this enzyme and thus prevents testosterone from binding to it, which would ultimately lead to its conversion into DHT. Basically, imagine if testosterone was Clark Kent and 5-alpha reductase was the phone booth where he changes into Superman. Propecia acts as a person that will occupy the phone booth and prevent Clark Kent from turning into Superman.

The first thing that you will need to do is talk to a physician about your intention to take Propecia. Hair loss is not something that will require you to go and see a doctor unless you wish to treat it with Propecia and visiting your doctor in such a case is all about one thing. It is about keeping you safe. You will need to share your medical history with them and tell them of any medical conditions that you are suffering from or that you suffered from in the past. This way, they will know whether you can start using Propecia and what doses you should take.

The next thing to do is to adhere to the prescription you were given. If your doctor has established a dosage, do not exceed it and also do not take less of the medication. If you overdo it, you are increasing the chances of experiencing side effects that are usually very, very are. These side effects include such as: changes in sex drive, swelling of the hands and feet, dizziness, headache, skin rash, runny nose, weakness, tenderness in the breasts, abnormal ejaculation. These are nothing serious, but if they start to bother you too much, see a doctor and inform them about this.

It is also crucial that you take v regularly and for at least 3 months. It will take time for Propecia to lower the levels of dihydrotestosterone in your system and thus reduce hair loss. Also, regular use will ensure that this happens as quickly as possible. In three months, you should start to see the results, although this might take longer for some people. Some people are irresponsive to treatment with Propecia and if you do not see any results in 12 months, you are probably one of them and you should talk about discontinuing the treatment with your doctor.

Due to certain changes that Propecia can do to your PSA levels, your doctor will probably want you to come regularly for checkups. Because of this and the fact that in some very rare cases v may cause adverse effects to the health, you will need to make these appointments and have regular consultations with your physician. This will also help establish whether Propecia is working for you the way it should.

You should also remember that Propecia tablets, especially if they are damaged in any way, should not be handled by children or women who are pregnant or who might be pregnant. The reason for this is that in such cases they might come into contact with the active ingredient in Propecia, finasteride, which is absorbable through skin and that may cause adverse effects, such as birth defects or developmental issues.

Finally, make sure that you do not use any medications, supplements, minerals, vitamins or any other similar substances concomitantly with Propecia unless you have discussed this with your doctor or a pharmacist and have been told that no interactions will occur.

To be very technical, Propecia is a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor. Now, this probably does not mean a lot to you. Well, we will try and divide this into parts that we will separately explain. First of all, you should know what 5-alpha reductase is and what does it do. Well, it is an enzyme whose main job it is to convert testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, mainly in the prostate and on the scalp of men. The question now is why it is important to inhibit this enzyme.

Well, dihydrotestosterone, or DHT for short is a hormone that is more potent than ordinary testosterone and which acts on the androgen receptors much more forcefully. The effects of this hormone differ from one part of the body to the next and while in prostate it can increase its size, leading to enlarged prostate, in the scalp it leads to deterioration of the hair follicles and subsequent hair loss. Therefore, when 5-alpha reductase is inhibited, the levels of DHT decrease and the hair loss is reduced and even inverted.  There is another medication that has the same active ingredient that Propecia does, finasteride and this medication is used for treatment of enlarged prostate. It is called Proscar.

Propecia is a prescription drug, which means that you will require a prescription to purchase it. Today, you can do this even without a prescription and if you choose to do this, we urge you to still talk to your doctor. It is necessary to do so if you wish to be certain that it will cause no side effects and that it will not harm your health in any way.

One of the most important things to keep in mind about Propecia is that it should never be handled by small children or women, especially if they are pregnant. While the tablets are coated for protection, there is always a chance that they might be damaged and that someone might come into contact with the active ingredient in them. The problem with this is that if this active ingredient is absorbed by a pregnant woman, it may lead to severe birth defects and developmental issues if handled by a small child. Therefore, it is important to always keep it out of reach.

You will also need to take Propecia for some time in order to see results. The first results can be observed after three months in general, with the results improving the more you use this drug. However, if after 12 months you see no decrease in hair loss, you should probably give it up.