I wanted to say that my wife is 8 months pregnant and I have been on fin for ~ 16 months.
I recently read that prednisone is usually not related with hair loss in women, but I am a 35 year old female who has ulcerative colitis. I spent 2 weeks in the hospital where they gave me prednisone intraveniously as well. I have been on oral doses starting at 55mg and over a course of about 5 months, have gone down to 5mg and will soon be off. I am also taking Asacol which may also be contributing to my hair loss. I have also been losing A LOT of my hair and it is really starting to affect my confidence. I have been hospitalized 3 other times for this condition where I also lost hair due to the meds and it did return. I just don’t remember it being as extreme. Is there a product I can take to help me grow it back and is it the Prednisone that has caused this hair loss? Thank you for your time.
Your hair loss can be attributed to multiple causes, such as malnutrition from Ulcerative Colitis, the medication in Asacol, and stress from your recent hospitalization. Steroids have androgenic properties and can also be the cause of your hair loss. I do not know if the hair loss is reversible, certainly as long as you are on many of these medications. If the medications have precipitated genetic hair loss, you may not get benefits even if you are off of the medications.
Hi,
I am currently on prednisone and have been taking 40 mg for many months now on 30mg. I was told by my doctor that my hair loss, since July, is due to the meds. But, it is stated here in the site that this drug only impacts men w/hair loss and women. Please clarify this for me. Is there a small percentage that lose hair on this drug ?? I may be on it for a few more months and need to know this. Also if I am correct , if it’s the drug than once off it than hair would grow back and be back fully in a yr or so ??
thanks
Steroids, as you said, do precipitate hair loss in men. Women also have some male hormones, so I would suspect that there could be some association with hair loss in your situation. The reality is that you need them for medical purposes. Women rarely have permanent hair loss and usually reverse once the offending problem that created it is gone. That goes for stress, cancer drugs, and other types of processes that precipitate hair loss in women.
I consulted a hair transplant doc who prescribes prednisone for post-operative swelling. I wouldn’t want to take this due to its obvious side effects.
Have you ever heard of giving prednisone after a hair transplant and do you prescribe it?
Sounds weird to me (and unnecessary).
The use of short term prednisone following a hair transplant is common to prevent swelling in the first few days. Short term steroids are not usually a problem unless you are diabetic. This is a medical call by the doctor you are choosing. Please address this with your doctor so he/she can better explain the issue and address your particular concerns.
I’m 25 and I have a Norwood 2 and I’m just wondering at what age is your final Norwood apparent or predictable?
For most men, hair loss patterns can be picked up by the age of 26 with proper tools (Microscopic imaging and micrometers); however, this is not a 100% rule as I have seen men start their balding in their 30s, 40s, and even in the 50s.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6746394/
This is an easy pattern for an expert’s eye to predict as outlined (in the right photo I marked up the left photo). The Norwood Class 5A pattern has a narrow crown component and when this man completes his balding pattern he will be bald back to the top of his crown (indicated on the photo). What is significant is the persistent forelock which has hair that is stronger than the surrounding hair. These forelocks tend to run in families and if this man keeps his forelock until he is 35, it is likely he could maintain it in the long term. Looking back at his family patterns, he should see if his father or grandfathers had this persistent juvenile hairline into older ages. From a transplant perpective, when this man’s balding becomes significant enough to require a hair transplant, having an “A” pattern is good news because almost everyone with the ‘A’ type patterns always have enough hair to get a full head of hair restored.
Prenatal exposure to pot is associated with differences in the thickness of the brain, particularly in the frontal brain, in preadolescent children. This was a study done with MRIS. This was written by Hanan El Marroun, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and published online June 15 in Biological Psychiatry.
Children aged 6 to 8 years were invited into the MRI component of the program and the mothers use of cannabis exposure during pregnancy was measured with maternal self-report asking questions for each each trimester of the pregnancy. 113 nonexposed children; 96 children whose mothers smoked only tobacco during pregnancy; and 54 children whose mothers were studied during the pregnancy.
When comparing exposed to non-exposed children, those exposed to cannabis had “thicker frontal cortices, specifically, a thicker superior frontal area of the left hemisphere… and a thicker frontal pole of the right hemisphere” This part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, supports functions such as the ability to suppress responses and thoughts, attention, higher-order motor control, and working memory.
My comments and opinions are really just meant to stand on their own merits or lack thereof. But I can share that I have had close visibility into what research the PFS Foundation has been doing over the past several years. Even once there is an important finding, it can take years before it makes it into the public eye. I wish things moved more quickly, but this is just the reality of research and the media. Just as an example, the legal documents that served as the basis for the Reuters story were (accidentally) filed publicly on the court docket in mid-2016, but it took over 3 years to make it into the mainstream media. The FDA has known about these issues since 2017 from the PFS Foundation’s Citizen Petition, but the FDA has done nothing yet. I hope the media will pick up on this but we will have to see.
The PFS Foundation has accomplished a few things so far:
Their research has established biomarkers in PFS patients. This shows that PFS is a physical condition rather than psychosomatic, as many people have argued for years. The studies looked at small groups of PFS patients and found two very important things. Compared to controls, PFS patients had undetectable (depleted) levels of neurosteroids in their CSF. Additonally, about 50% of PFS patients appear to have their 5AR2 gene silence. It would be great to have these studies done in much larger populations, but it is very hard to recruit PFS patients due to financial and logistical constraints when it is a rare disease. That doesn’t invalidate the findings of these studies of the existence of the disease itself.
Another Northwestern based study was a very high powered epidemiological study that showed about 1% of patients who took 5-AR inhibitors (finasteride and dutasteride) developed persistent erectile dysfunction. This was controlled in many ways using very sophisticated statistical techniques. Even at 1%, this is a low frequency risk but terribly significant if it occurs.
Lastly, a few years ago there was an article published in JAMA Dermatology that critiqued every one of the clinical trials to date that were published on finasteride. The main critique was that they were simply not effectively designed to sensitize for low frequency, persistent side effects. This article seems prescient now because Merck didn’t report the patients who dropped out of their study and there were apparently PFS patients within this group. This does not seem to have been an accident in retrospect in light of the documents that are now available.
Merck has acted unethically throughout this whole controversy. I can share with you a couple anecdotes with you.
Although I can’t specifically provide names, Merck has interfered with the research publishing process. Somebody from company reached out to at least one journal editor who published an unfavorable study on finasteride. Merck pressured them to withhold support to the journal if the editor did it again.
Personally, I had a physician reach out to Merck about a decade ago to figure out what was going on with my health. The physician spoke with a pharmacovigilance contact, but I don’t remember the name it was so long again. The person said Merck had never received any reports of sexual dysfunction. This was clearly false because of the data that was hidden from the clinical trials. Additionally, at that time Merck had already been forced to warn of such side effects in European countries. And this was shortly before the FDA forced a label change in 2012 to include post-marketing reports, all of which happened before my outreach to Merck.
These are all things I know factually to be true but I can’t provide “proof” until it gets into the public domain. I hope it gets there, but it may never be the case. But if you look at Merck’s response to Vioxx, they did many of the same things I just described for their response to the Propecia scandal.
2019-12-02 02:02:332019-12-01 17:28:22Poster on Reddit speaks out about Post Finasteride Syndrome (PRS)
