The lost men: how Merck, GSK papered over bad outcomes in trials
A re-examination of clinical trials of finasteride and dutasteride reveals warning signs of long-term harms to surface later.
Research
The lost men – appendix
A summary of men who had unresolved and severe adverse events in clinical trials of finasteride and dutasteride.
Andrew Huberman, PhD discusses post-finasteride syndrome on the Huberman Lab podcast
Today’s episode of the popular Huberman Lab Podcast is titled “The Science of Healthy Hair, Hair Loss and How to Regrow Hair.” It includes a five-minute discussion of post-finasteride syndrome. In the segment, Huberman raises an issue that has been little-discussed in the literature: the role of the androgen dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in development throughout the … Read more
How Merck buried finasteride’s full impact on hormone signaling
Merck held that finasteride had a simple and selective mechanism. In fact, it disrupts hormonal pathways much more broadly. These pathways support the brain, reproductive system and other organs. Merck’s selective account concealed risks which would surface in the decades after approval of Propecia.
A rundown of new bibliographies & research guides
The research base spans many disciplines and goes back almost 50 years. To help researchers get oriented, an on-ramp was added. In the Systems & functions area, a new bibliography was added: Adverse effects on skin, comprising nine case reports. The gynecomastia bibliography has been expanded. The bibliography on the musculoskeletal system has been expanded … Read more
Hair or manhood—choose one?
In ancient Greece, Hippocrates and Aristotle observed that eunuchs did not go bald. Jumping ahead to the early 1940s, American anatomist James B. Hamilton reviewed histories of men with testosterone deficiency and found a pattern: the earlier the age of hormone deficiency, the less balding occurred.
Meta-analysis launders safety data from old pharma trials; blames patients for drug harms
Despite serious methodological shortcomings—including the preposterous use of on-drug safety data as a proxy for a post-drug condition—the authors nevertheless blame the post-drug syndrome on patient shortcomings. Zhang et al. have yoked bad logic to biased data in order to deflect attention away from drug harms.
Context matters: a rebuttal to yet another analysis of adverse events of finasteride
This post responds to a recent research letter: Disproportional signal of sexual dysfunction reports associated with finasteride use in young men with androgenetic alopecia: a pharmacovigilance analysis of VigiBase.
A tweeted rebuttal to yet another analysis of finasteride adverse events
A thread originally posted on Twitter is reproduced below. For an in-depth version, see the essay Context matters. See also a critique of three previous papers with similar designs, findings and conclusions. Twitter thread Nguyen et al, 2022 is the fourth analysis of adverse events of finasteride to appear since 2018. All four studies play … Read more
How was finasteride invented?
Although finasteride came on the market in the 1990s, the underlying research began two decades earlier. The rationale for the drug emerged from a study of a unique group of people in a remote village in the Dominican Republic called Las Salinas. Locals there have long known about children who follow an unusual developmental path: … Read more