What happens if you skip your AGA treatment?

Because there is no established method to completely cure AGA,AGA treatment can only improve the symptoms with medication and slow the progression of AGA.
Since the medication simply suppresses the effects of male hormones, if you stop taking the medication on your own judgment, the male hormones will act on hair loss, and you will return to your pre-treatment state.
To maintain the improved scalp condition achieved through treatment, treatment must be continued for the rest of your life.

 Once you have AGA, it is a progressive disease that cannot be cured and there is no fundamental treatment.
This time, we will explain what happens if you skip AGA treatment based on the cases of our clinic.

Case study of AGA treatment

 Patient: 41-year-old male
Symptoms: I started to worry about thinning hair two years ago.
Treatment history ①: I started taking finasteride orally through personal import about 4 months ago,
I was worried about side effects, so I wanted to go to the clinic regularly.
Treatment history ②: 2 mesotherapy treatments on the scalp within about 4 months prior to visiting our clinic
Genetic background: My maternal grandfather and father both had thinning hair.

If your maternal grandfather had thinning hair, you are at higher risk of having thinning hair.
Since AGA is a genetic disease, we have determined that this person definitely has AGA.

If you would like to know more about the relationship between genetics and AGA, please read this article.
 

41-year-old male: Photo taken at first visit

Here is a photo from the first visit.
As the person in question is aware, a little bit of scalp is visible on the top of her head, giving it a see-through look.
Because he had taken medication and undergone mesotherapy treatment, his condition was not very advanced considering his age of 41, but when examined under a microscope, symptoms of AGA were apparent.

Treatment content

Regarding treatment, the patients' wishes were as follows:
・Since I have already received mesotherapy treatment,This time I will try oral medication.
I want to undergo treatment slowly while paying close attention to changes in my physical condition and side effects.

【Treatment content】
Take two types of oral medication every day
・Oral medication: Finasteride
・Oral medication: Minoxidil

You can read more about medicines here.
 

Four months after starting treatment

This photo was taken 4 months after the start of treatment.
The treatment is working well on the thinning hair on the top of my head.
Prior to treatment at our clinic, the patient had been taking medication and undergoing mesotherapy treatment, and there was such a big change in just four months from just taking two types of oral medication.
However, it seemed that the patient was satisfied after experiencing the effects of the treatment, so after we took photos of the treatment progress and gave him a month's supply of oral medication, he did not return to the clinic for three months.

The result of skipping treatment

 Please take a look at the photo taken when he visited us for the first time in three months.
I'm sure many of you were surprised that after all the effort you put into improving your skin, it would go back to the way it was before.

When we asked her about the period when she had not visited the hospital, we found out that she had stopped taking oral medication that she was supposed to take every day.He decided to take the medication once every three days, and took a month's supply over a period of three months, and came to see us when he had just run out of the medication.
"I thought I was able to maintain the condition I had been in for four months since starting treatment..."
Since you cannot see the top of your head directly, the patient was surprised when he saw this photo.

Many people become anxious when their hair is thin and take the medication regularly, but when their hair starts to grow back they become careless and stop taking the medication. However, stopping the medication on your own judgment will only cause the symptoms of AGA to worsen.
It seems that he has personally come to understand the importance of continuing his medication.

The importance of continuing oral medication

Every drug has a half-life, the period during which the concentration of the drug in the blood decreases and the drug becomes less effective.
It works by ensuring that the drug's components are constantly present in the bloodstream and stabilized.
Stabilizing the blood concentration ensures a stable effect of the medication, so you need to take the medication regularly to increase the blood concentration and maintain a certain level of finasteride and minoxidil in your blood.
That's why it's recommended to take it at the same time every day, rather than at random times.
For this reason, the half-life is considered an important guideline for determining the interval between doses, and it is also important to adhere to the prescribed usage, dosage, and duration.

If you take the medication once every three days, as in this case, the concentration of medication in your blood will be close to zero by the time you take the next dose. Even if you take the medication three days later, the concentration of medication in your blood will not be stable and the effects of the medication will not be stable either.
In this case, the patient was not completely unaware of the medication, so the hair did not thin rapidly, but because he reduced the rate of taking the medication to once every three days, the symptoms of AGA worsened.
However, if I hadn't taken any alcohol at all, the condition may have progressed further.

Some clinics recommend taking the medication orally once every two days, but this is because the prescription is based on expert judgment, so I think there is a good reason for this.
We would like to ask you to please refrain from making your own decisions regarding the pace of taking such medication.

Two months after resuming treatment

 Two months after resuming treatment, I continued taking the medication every day, and as a result the progression of AGA has been slowed down and my hair is gradually returning to normal, but I still haven't been able to return to the condition it was in four months ago.
Looking at these results, it is entirely possible that if the patient had continued taking the medication rather than reducing it on their own judgment, they would have been in an even better condition after nine months.
First of all, in order to return to the state you were in four months later, it seems necessary to continue taking the basic oral medication without missing a dose.

Summary

I believe that by looking at actual cases, the participants were able to see the need to continue taking oral medication.
I hope this will be helpful to you when you are unsure whether to continue treatment.

I thought that explaining the condition while looking at pictures would be the easiest and most realistic experience, so I introduced this case.