In article <kofi-C3FEF6.14043508102003 at news03.west.earthlink.net>,
kofi <kofi at anon.un> wrote:
> If someone with some form of TMJ, attention deficit or glutamate
> excitotoxicity experienced a severe worsening of symptoms when taking a
> 5AR inhibitor, would you attribute that then to some neurological
> function performed by 5AR itself?
It's not a 5AR inhibitor - it's a competetive inert substrate. That is
to say it attenuates the 5-alpha-reduction process needed to convert the
inactive to the neurologically active steroid. So I would attribute
that to changes in active steroid levels, but I think they would need to
be gross before it would be allowed to produce enough disruption to
seize.
I'm not at all sure what you mean by grouping "TMJ, attention deficit or
glutamate excitotoxicity" there - I don't know what TMJ is, aside from
the temporo-mandibular joint; I know of no link between ADD and
glutamate or GABA modulation; and "glutamate excitotoxicity" refers to
cell death triggered during brain ischaemia as far as I know. Why do
you specifically refer to these as if they were at particular risk for
finasteride side effects?
> I have communicated with people who took even low dose finasteride and
> experienced, consistently, very palpable differences in the way they
> felt while drinking.
I can certainly believe this - both substances act at the GABA-A
receptor, and the phenomenon of being drunk shows just how little the
system needs to be perturbed in order to feel very weird indeed. If
you're simultaneously altering the levels of another substance acting at
the same receptor, I would expect strong subjective differences in the
experience. Alcohol and allopregnanolone would interact differentially
depending on the subunit composition of the receptor itself (i.e. the
different variants of the elements forming the channel). In that case,
changing both factors simultaneously would have different effects in
different parts of the brain (e.g. synergistic inhibition in one region,
partial antagonism in others) and would alter the sensation hugely I
think.
An interesting conversation - why are your posts anonymous, by the way?
Matthew.
