Coronavirus is causing baldness in some, says expert
COVID-19 can cause baldness, a leading doctor has revealed.
Dr Eoghan de Barra said hair loss has been experienced in patients who went for check-ups weeks after they had been discharged from hospital after battling the virus.
‘There are still a lot of unanswered questions. Internationally there’s some evidence to suggest rates of either heart bruising or damage there – or certainly lung fibrosis or damage after Covid, and there’s a lot of people who had a significant amount of fatigue or their sense of taste or smell hasn’t returned months later,’ the consultant said.
He said hair loss was another consequence and added: ‘To put all these things in context, many viral infections that we would consider benign can have long-term consequences.’
The RCSI senior lecturer and consultant in infectious diseases at Beaumont Hospital said he viewed the coming months ‘with quite a bit of foreboding’.
‘We know that every winter in October in Ireland and across the Northern Hemisphere there’s a mini-wave, a surge of flu,’ he said.
That leads to about 4,000 hospital admissions in a bad season including 200 in intensive care units.
And he warned: ‘This winter we may be facing two viruses which we hope we’ll be able to diagnose in a similar timely fashion but it puts a lot of pressure on resources and on healthcare workers.’ However, he said the current measures to prevent the spread of the deadly Covid-19 will help slow the number of people who catch the flu.
But at the same time recovering post-Covid patients are continuing to return to hospitals with serious after-effects. ‘They’re not necessarily coming back into hospital as acute inpatients,’ he explained. ‘So this is routine care, somebody was admitted to hospital with something, we follow them up in the weeks or
months that follow and because we don’t know an awful lot about Covid as yet, we’re following them and trying to do it in a structured way,’ he told RTÉ’s Today show yesterday.
The virus is still so new to mankind that medics are still unsure of its long-term effects. Dr de Barra said an estimated 30,000-plus have contracted the virus in Ireland. ‘So even if only 1% of the population who had Covid experience hair loss or lung fibrosis, it’s 300-plus people,’ he said.
‘Whether they [the after-effects] are somewhat psychological in nature because they’ve been quarantined and isolated and all the concerns over Covid or whether it’s genuinely they have an organ that’s dysfunctioning following Covid, that’s the difficult thing to tease out.’
However, he noted: ‘We are seeing patients who have significant symptoms after Covid.’
Fibrosis is a lung disease that occurs when the tissue becomes damaged and scarred which makes it more difficult to breathe.