I’m trying to understand whether my reasoning is correct here, or if I’m missing something.
My understanding is:
“If you start finasteride, it can make sense to measure hormones such as testosterone, DHT (and potentially other androgen-related markers) because finasteride works by reducing the amount of DHT your body produces. Those blood tests can therefore help show what’s changing hormonally after starting treatment. Pyrilutamide is different. It’s designed to block androgen receptors in the scalp rather than reduce the amount of DHT circulating in your bloodstream. So even if a small amount of pyrilutamide were absorbed systemically and started blocking androgen receptors elsewhere in the body, your blood levels of DHT and testosterone could still remain completely normal, because the drug isn’t reducing hormone production—it’s blocking the hormone’s action at the receptor. Because of that, it seems there aren’t really any established blood tests that can tell you whether pyrilutamide is having systemic anti-androgen effects in the same way that hormone tests can help interpret the effects of finasteride.”
Is this an accurate way of thinking about it, or are there blood tests (or other biomarkers) that could actually be useful before starting pyrilutamide if your goal is to detect potential systemic anti-androgen effects?