Post-finasteride syndrome: An emerging clinical problem
Silvia Diviccaro, Roberto Cosimo Melcangi, Silvia Giatti
Neurobiology of Stress2019
Summary (paraphrased)
This review, authored by the Milan neurosteroid group, frames persistent adverse effects of 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors as an emerging clinical problem. It surveys reports of sexual dysfunction and mood disturbance during finasteride/dutasteride treatment and the smaller literature on symptoms that persist after discontinuation, defining the PFS phenotype (sexual symptoms plus depression, anxiety, cognitive complaints). The authors note that most evidence at the time rested on patient self-report, that clinical studies were few, and that molecular and genetic mechanisms had barely been explored in either patients or animal models, concluding that dedicated mechanistic work was urgently needed.
Why it’s in the corpus
The keystone neurosteroid-group review that names PFS an emerging clinical problem and explicitly calls for mechanistic/genetic investigation — a direct framing document for the corpus's neurosteroid axis, surprisingly absent from v1.4.
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