Author Reply

The authors responded to a letter by discussing the impact of different age-weighting scenarios on the estimated benefits of finasteride on population mortality. They used the U.S. census age distribution for their study to avoid assumptions about the age distribution of prevented cases, and also conducted a parallel analysis using the SEER age distribution, which resulted in slightly lower but still positive estimates. They highlighted that the choice of reference databases significantly affects the estimates of finasteride's impact. Despite these variations, both their study and an independent analysis concluded that the benefits of finasteride outweighed the potential risks.