Category Archives: Avodart

Avodart, Dutasteride, Rick Rosner

Rick Rosner Takes Avodart for Hair Loss

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Update: October 27, 2020 — Rick Rosner still takes Avodart.

This is one of the strangest stories that I have read from which I found something of relevance to write about for this blog. Rick Rosner supposedly has the second highest IQ in the world, despite spending 10 years in high school, from which he graduated at the age of 27 in 1987. He is presently unemployed.

Today, this genius takes around 50 pills per day or 38 pills per day (numbers vary depending on source). He admits that a majority of the pills he takes are probably useless. However, he does not seem to be worried about the side effects of these pills. In all likelihood, Ricks 50-pill-a-day regimen is far more dangerous than Ray Kurzweil’s primarily supplement based regimen of 150 pills per day or 250 pills per day.

The most interesting thing about Rick when it comes to hair is that:

  1. He takes Avodart (Dutasteride) as part of his regimen. It seems that he likes Avodart because it helps with prostate health, helps hair and increases testosterone (Rick is a gym addict).
  2. He had 13 mini hair transplant procedures (totaling 1,650 plugs) several decades ago when hair transplant technology was bad. He mentions the latter in his Twitter feed. It seems like his hair is pretty decent to me, in spite of the bad plugs.
  3. His topless photos on Twitter also suggest that he has no body hair, which to me is always strange (since most balding men tend to have above average body hair in my years of observation). It must be noted, however, that Rick has very little evident balding.

It is unlikely that he has been taking that drug for more than 10 years since it was only approved in the US in 2002. Did he witness a miraculous result like Dr. Marty Sawaya did on her patients?  I communicated with Rick via Twitter and he responded:

Avodart, Dutasteride, GlaxoSmithKline

GSK Publishes Japanese Dutasteride Study Results

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I previously wrote about dutasteride possibly being approved by the US FDA to treat hair loss in 2015.  In August 2014, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) published 6-month interim results from a Japanese clinical study of 120 male patients with androgenetic alopecia taking 0.5 mg of dutasteride daily.  You can also download the findings by clicking on the Result Summary tab here and then clicking on the pdf link there.

It should be noted that all patients were Japanese and four patients withdrew from the trial.  Key findings:

  1. 81 percent of patients saw at least some increase in vertex hair count (10 percent saw a great increase, 33 percent saw a moderate increase).
  2. 71 percent of patients saw at least some increase in frontal hair count (8 percent saw a great increase, 32 percent saw a moderate increase).
  3. Only one patient saw a decrease in vertex hair count, and only one patient saw a decrease in frontal hair count.  It is not clear if this was the same patient.  Both saw only a slight decrease.
    (My note: For all intents and purposes, this implies that Dutasteride guarantees at the very least hair loss cessation after 6 months of use).
  4. 11 percent of patients reported erectile dysfunction as a side effect and slightly smaller percentages of patients reported decreased libido, ejaculation disorders and sexual dysfuntion.(My note: Since each patient can report more than one side effect, I am guessing that most of the 11 percent reporting erectile dysfunction also reported the other sexual side effects I listed above.  However, the end of the pdf states that 38 percent of patients had side effects, which I think is an error as they are ignoring multiple side effect reports).

For 6 months, I found the hair loss related results slightly better than expected, but the side effects slightly worse than expected.  I am assuming here that something like 15-20 percent of patients had side effects rather than 38 percent as reported, based on my assumption that multiple side effects on one person were reported individually (i.e., double, triple… counted) for some reason.

If 38 percent of patients really did get side effects, we will not see Dutasteride getting approved to treat hair loss in the US or Japan in my opinion.