Liver damage from finasteride?

[hardcastle]

I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but this post kind of spooked me:

http://www.hairlosstalk.com/discussions ... hp?t=14645

[quote]i have been taking finasteride/poscar for about 11 months now. am unsure if there have been any major effects on my hair loss but it seems the medication may have damaged my liver. i developed a bad case of jaundice with very high liver function tests last month and had to stay in hospital for 2 weeks. i am now on a course of steroids to help the liver recover. the specialist thinks that i may have auto immune hepatitis - a chronic liver disease where the liver attacks itself through elevateed immune response. he thinks that the proscar may be responsible for the severe hepatitis, given that DHT is an important androgen in the liver. i have been googling around trying to learn more but cant find too much, however one site says that proscar interferes with the liver's urea (arginine - orthinine - citrulline) cycle and the
Arginine-NO (Nitric Oxide) - cGMP conversion in the nervous endings of the arteries.
quote]

Anyone hear about this? This is the first time I've seen liver damage blamed on finasteride, so it doesn't seem like a common side effect, but I'm still concerned.

[HairLossFight.com]

Hardcastle,

I see nobody has addressed your post. I think that you should put this into perspective. Proscar and Propecia have been around for a while now. If this were a significant problem then I think we would have heard about it by now and the drugs would have been banned most likely.

Sure, Propecia and Proscar will put a bit of a load on your liver, but so does alcohol and so do many other substances. They key is to try to keep the "bad" things to a minimum so that you can use Propecia without having to worry about it.

I use it and I don't worry about my liver at all.

Regards,
Sam

[hardcastle]

Right, I haven't heard too much about liver problems from Proscar myself, besides those forum posts I mentioned. I was just curious if anyone else had.

I'm reading the documents that Merck filed with the FDA when they were applying for approval of Propecia. If they say anything specific about possible liver problems, I'll put it up here.