Finasteride and the Yellow Card Scheme

If finasteride gave you side effects, you can report it yourself. It takes about fifteen minutes, you do not need a doctor, and you do not need proof. By 5 April 2024 the UK regulator had received 426 such reports, and in almost half of them people had still not recovered.

New to this? Start with the guide. If you already know what happened to you, go straight to the form.

Who are you actually reporting to?

The MHRA is the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. In plain terms: it is the government body that decides what warnings go on a medicine in the UK, and whether a medicine can stay on sale at all.

The Yellow Card scheme is how it hears about side effects. It has run since 1964, and it is at yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk.

Here is what people usually get wrong about it:

• You do not need a doctor to agree with you.
• You do not need to prove the drug caused it. Suspicion is enough.
• You do not need to still be taking the drug.
• Your report counts the same whether it comes from you or from a consultant.

That last point matters here more than for most medicines. Post-Finasteride Syndrome (PFS) is the name people use for symptoms that carry on after stopping finasteride (sold as Propecia, Proscar and as generics). A common experience is being told it is not happening. If you wait for someone else to file it, it may never get filed. If you are still working out whether this is what you have, read what PFS actually is first.

Which code do you use?

This is the part almost everyone misses, and it is the difference between a report that is findable and one that disappears into a general pile.

Regulators do not store your words. They store a MedDRA term - a code from a standard medical dictionary, used by every regulator in the world so reports can be counted together. If your report is not coded to the right term, nobody searching for this pattern will find it.

There is a specific code for this.

A few things worth knowing about that term:

• “5-alpha-reductase inhibitor” is the drug class finasteride belongs to. The term means “the syndrome that came after that drug”.
• It is the official name. “Post-Finasteride Syndrome” is what patients call it, and it is not in the dictionary - so do not use it on its own.
• Still describe your symptoms in your own words as well. The code puts your report in the right group; your description is what a human assessor reads.
• Our reporting guide has the same term translated for 65 countries, if you are reporting outside the UK.

What to have ready before you start

You can do it from your phone. Have these to hand:

• The drug name and dose - for example finasteride 1mg.
• When you started and when you stopped, as close as you can remember.
• What happened, in your own words. Plain language is fine.
• Whether it started or continued after you stopped taking it. The MHRA specifically asked reporters to say particularly if a side effect continued or started after treatment was stopped. That is the gap in the record. You are the one who can fill it.
• Any other medicines you were taking at the time.

You do not need dates to be exact. An approximate month is better than no report.

What happens after you press send?

Not nothing, and not magic either. The MHRA publishes the sequence.

1

It gets acknowledged

You receive a copy of what you submitted. A real record now exists outside your own head.

2

It goes into the database

Checked, quality-audited, and made searchable alongside every other UK report.

3

Software compares drugs against each other

It looks for drug-and-symptom pairs showing up more often than you would expect. This is why the code matters: it is what your report is grouped by.

4

People look at the pattern

Doctors, pharmacists and scientists weigh it against published research and data from other countries, then advise an expert committee.

5

Something changes, or it stays watched

For finasteride this produced a warning card inside every pack in 2024, and updated warnings in 2026.

Two details people find reassuring:

• Your report does not need to prove anything on its own. The MHRA says “causality is not assigned to individual reports” - they are judged together, as a group.
• It travels. Reports from Great Britain are shared with the WHO’s monitoring centre in Uppsala and with the manufacturer. Reports from Northern Ireland go to the European Medicines Agency instead.

How many reports are already there?

Straight from the regulator’s own bulletins:

• 426 reports of finasteride and sexual dysfunction, from November 1992 to 5 April 2024. In almost half, the outcome was recorded as “not recovered” or “not resolved”.
• 281 reports of finasteride and depressed mood or suicidal and self-injurious behaviour, since February 1993.
• 170 reports of suicidal thinking, and 19 reports of death by suicide, up to 31 May 2025, from the May 2026 update.

Be careful how you read those numbers. They are a count of reports, not a measure of how common the problem is. The MHRA is blunt about it: reported reactions “do not necessarily mean that the medicine has caused the reaction”, and Yellow Card data cannot be used to work out rates or to rank one drug against another. The numbers describe the size of the record, not the size of the problem.

The reports did lead somewhere, twice:

• 2024 - an expert committee recommended a warning card inside every finasteride pack, because the side effects were “not well known by prescribers and patients”.
• 2026 - the MHRA required the leaflet for finasteride 1mg to warn that sexual side effects can affect mood, and can also happen without any mood change.

One limit, stated plainly because other pages blur it. Patients asked the MHRA directly to recognise Post-Finasteride Syndrome as a medical diagnosis. Its published answer was that this is not within the MHRA’s remit. It has accepted that persistent sexual and psychiatric side effects get reported with finasteride. That is a smaller claim than recognising a syndrome, and it is the true one.

Does one report even matter?

Here is the honest answer, which is better than the usual encouragement.

Nobody knows how much goes unreported. Asked for its estimate, the MHRA replied in writing that it does not have one (FOI 24/310, April 2024). In the same letter it confirmed that all systems like this “are known to be subject to under-reporting”.

So the gap is not something patients invented. It is the regulator’s own position, with no number attached.

That sounds bleak until you see what it means:

• The MHRA works around the gap by comparing drugs against each other, not by counting how many people were harmed.
• That comparison runs on how many reports each drug builds up, relative to every other drug.
• So filing changes an input to that comparison.

It is a smaller claim than “your report triggers an investigation”. No rule says a certain number of reports forces action. But an unreported reaction is not a quieter signal. It is simply not in the database.

What you can do now

1. File the report at yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk, using MedDRA term Post 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor syndrome (10082430). Fifteen minutes.
2. Outside the UK? Our reporting guide covers the US FDA route and 65 countries, with the term in each language.
3. Add yourself to the patient registry. The Yellow Card records one reaction. The registry records a person over time, which is what researchers need and what a regulator’s database was never built to hold. Doing both takes under an hour.

If you are struggling with your mental health, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, any time of day.