Why is only Propecia implicated in PFS?

[the_charger]

Just to start off, I have been on propecia for a half a year or so and haven’t had any side effects. However, I am still pretty interested in the topic of PFS and serious symptoms that one could end up with by taking finasteride. After all, I want to be as sure as I can be that I won’t end up with serious problems. My doctor has told me he has looked into this because I was concerned, and says I have nothing to worry about.. But still I want to be as sure as I can be!

I have been spending a bit of time looking at propeciahelp. The one big question I have that no one seems to ask is why do only men taking propecia (1mg) end up with PFS, but not men taking proscar, the 5mg version? Don’t get confused with the men that get prescribed proscar and cut them up into 1mg pieces. I am talking about older men who are 40+ years old taking proscar for prostate troubles.

The big reason I find this very weird is I saw this press release about finasteride from the ISHRS and this is a quote taken from it:

Since receiving FDA approval in December of 1997, 20.5 million and 6.7 million patient-years of exposure using Proscar and Propecia respectively are recorded with a low adverse event profile. The ISHRS believes that these are the most current and reliable data available until further studies are conducted.

Even though patient years of exposure don’t tell us exactly how many men have been on each drug, it does show that men have been exposed to proscar 3-4x as much as men taking propecia. This would tell me that there should be 3-4x as many men who took proscar that should be complaining of persistent symptoms. But this didn’t happen.. Nobody even really heard about these serious symptoms until recently, in the last couple years, even though men have been taking proscar for the last 20 years.

I looked through a lot of the member stories on propeciahelp over the last couple days and problems are almost exclusively linked to 1mg propecia, taken for hair loss. To me, this makes no sense, and makes me really think something else could be going on other than just “finasteride is causing all these problems”.

I am anything but an expert in medicine or statistics, but what do you guys think? Does anybody have a good explanation for why this would happen? I hope this leads to some good discussion and not a war…