Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist Eric Christensen.

You can track me down on LinkedIn, Eric Christensen, FarmD, BcPS, Bcg, or you can also find me at

Med Education 101 at gmail.com. If you have questions or suggestions or curious about different resources as far as

drug interactions or case studies, I can definitely send you to those links if interested there.

I hope you enjoy the episode today. Today I'm going to cover Phanasteride. A brand name of this medication is pro-scar,

or it's also known as propitia. And I'll get into the different indications there for each of

those agents. So first, this drug is categorized as a 5 alpha reductase inhibitor.

And what this means is by blocking 5 alpha reductase, this prevents the conversion of testosterone

to dihydhydro testosterone.

Okay.

So ultimately what this drug is going to do is reduce the levels of dihydrotestosterone.

Now what does dihydrotestosterone do?

Dihydro testosterone plays an important role in causing or contributing to the growth of the

prostate. So as you can imagine, a 5-alve reductase inhibitor like phenasteride can be used to help

shrink the prostate and manage symptoms of BPH. Now you might ask yourself why no testosterone

increases the size of the prostate as well so want there to be more of that around. And that is

true to an extent. However, dihydro testosterone is much, much more potent androgen than testosterone is.

So essentially you're reducing the overall androgen burden on that patient,

which again can help shrink the prostate and help symptoms of BPH.

In addition, dihydrotestosterone causes hair follicle damage. So what that means is it's

associated with baldness. So if we reduce that agent or that molecule hormone, we can actually help treat hair loss. And that is indeed one of

the other indications for fanasteride. So those are the two most common indications that I see it

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