Author: Dr. William Rassman

I just turned 20 and since a month before i turned 18 year old, i started to shed hair. Yes my uncle and father have lost hair, but with receding hair lines. For these 2.5 years, my hair has gotten thinner with no visible bald spots on my crown and no receding hair line.

My dermatologist prescribed me with extina foam and clobex lotion which indeed seem to cause my scalp to thin even more and a visible spot from the front of my hair line to the back of my crown. My question is, is this worsening of hair loss the result of these medical tools or was this inevitable? Mind you just a few months back in Febuaray i had no visible spots on my scalp. Info would be great in searching for an answer.

It is interesting that you can pinpoint the exact timing of when your hair loss started. If you indeed have genetic male pattern baldness, you simply can’t completely stop the progressive nature of the process. Medications may be used to slow it down and surgery may be used to add hair, but nothing will reverse the time factor.

The only FDA approved and clinically proven treatments are Rogaine (minoxidil) and Propecia (finasteride). Extina Foam is ketoconazole, and while there may be some anecdotal evidence that ketoconazole helps with treating hair loss, it hasn’t been FDA approved as such. Clobex is a powerful steroid, so I would expect that it might just hasten the hair loss process, just as we see with oral steroids. I understand there are thousands of treatment products and the option to use them is you and your doctor’s prerogative to try.

Snippet from the article:

A class of drugs meant to improve symptoms of an enlarged prostate gland actually increase the chance of getting a more serious form of prostate cancer, health officials said on Thursday. However, they also said the drugs’ benefits outweigh the risks.

The drugs in this group include Merck & Co’s Proscar and GlaxoSmithKline’s Avodar and Jalyn, as well as Merck’s Propecia, which is approved to treat male pattern hair loss.

The Food and Drug Administration said it revised the labels on all such drugs, called 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (5-ARI), to include the risk after reviewing two large studies.

Read the rest — Prostate drugs raise risk of prostate cancer: FDA

Today comes news that the FDA is warning that drugs like Avodart and Proscar may increase the risks of some forms of prostate cancer.

In the original studies, the overall incidence of prostate cancer in the thousands of individuals enrolled in a double blind FDA sponsored activity showed that overall risks of cancer in those men treated with 5mg finasteride (Proscar) saw a 25% decrease in risk of developing prostate cancer. After the study was published, pathologists looked at the types of cancer that they saw, and reported that of those fewer men that did develop prostate cancer, the presence of more aggressive cancers was greater in that group.

These risks are very small and the overall reduction of prostate cancer standing at 25% in the 7 year trial should offset the other risks of a more aggressive cancer, but the statistics on this are dubious at best. For those men who are taking finasteride (at any dose), they must recognize that there is a risk of a more aggressive prostate cancer, no matter how small that risk is.

The information about cancer reflects the experience with finasteride 5mg (Proscar), not 1mg for treating hair loss (Propecia). What we do not know is the threat of the 1mg dose, if any. There have been no reports that separate the 5mg and the 1mg dose in the cancer risk scenario.

Snippet from the article:

Lists of the side effects for prescription medications on drug labels, packaging and advertisements have mushroomed up to an average of 70 per medication, a new study reports.

Cautions about side effects were designed to inform doctors and consumers of potential hazards, but this expansion may have more to do with worries about litigation rather than actual health concerns, say the study authors, who argue the information could be presented much more efficiently.

“Having a high number of side effects on a drug’s label should not suggest that the drug is unsafe. In fact, much of this labeling has less to do with true toxicity than with protecting manufacturers from potential lawsuits,” the study’s lead author Dr. Jon Duke, Regenstrief Institute investigator and assistant professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said in a university news release.

Read the full text — Lists of Prescription Meds’ Side Effects Keep Growing

Although the article isn’t about hair loss, in light of the recent hubbub about Merck, finasteride, and side effects, I thought this was an interesting study worth sharing.