This was a good question from a reader named Wally — one which really hasn’t been addressed to my knowledge. He wanted to know if he took finasteride for a year and then quit, if he could maintain his gains using minoxidil. His full comments are below:
Hey! Firstly, your blog is awesome, probably the best I’ve seen! Your articles are well written and well researched, so a massive kudos to you. I had a question and I can’t seem to find the answer anywhere. I too hate the idea of being on any medication forever, so I was wondering: if I take finasteride for like a year or until I get gains, can I then switch to minoxidil to maintain those gains and stop finasteride? I asked my Derm. He had no idea but thought it was a good question. I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this. Thanks, Wally
My Response
Excellent question, and I appreciate your compliments on my blog! So, I will address this in a longer blog post in the near future, but in the meantime, here’s a pertinent resource that may help you: https://www.hairlosstalk.com/interact/threads/can-you-quit-rogaine-after-1-year-if-youre-on-dht-inhibitor.62198/
Basically, finasteride and min. have two different mechanisms for promoting hair growth — reducing DHT and promoting blood flow, respectively (actually, min’s mechanism for regrowing hair isn’t fully established even now, amazingly). So my guess is, and my brief research on the subject seems to corroborate this guess, that no, unfortunately your gains on Propecia would not be maintained with minoxidil.
Could the minoxidil slow down the Propecia losses to some degree? I’d say it’s possible, assuming you start on the minoxidil at least a few months before you stop the fin. You wouldn’t think minoxidil could differentiate between hairs strengthened with Propecia vs. other hairs.
But then, on the other hand, the hairs that thickened directly as a result of fin would likely revert without its DHT blocking effects and “catch-up” hair loss would still proceed? I don’t know, thinking out loud.
Upon further evaluation, I would guess that DHT-lowering topicals such as topical finasteride, RU58841 and to a lesser extent rosemary oil may yield the most benefits in terms of maintaining Propecia gains after stopping it.
There’s less risk of side effects, generally speaking, when a treatment is absorbed in the skin as opposed to ingested. Then of course you’d have to consider that none of the treatments I just listed are FDA approved. Pumpkin seed oil and dht-lowering supplements may also help. I’ll look into some more though as I said.
PRP could also slow down the fin-related hair loss to some degree, hypothetically, I would think. Keep in mind I’m no doctor! I’ll look into this some more, I’m surprised I’m not seeing many results when typing in “how to maintain gains after stopping Propecia” and other searches along those lines. Thanks for the question, and feel free to shoot me a line if you have anything else you’d like answered.
Robert Price is a writer, consumer advocate, and hair loss researcher with thousands of hours of experience in the field. His goal is to keep you out of the hair loss rabbit hole, underworld, or whatever you want to call it. He founded Hair Loss Daily, the unbiased hair loss blog, in 2016. You can learn more about Robert in the my story section of this website.