Pandemic stress has many struggling with hair loss
Annrene Rowe was getting ready to celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary this summer when she noticed a bald spot on her scalp. In the following days, her thick, shoulder-length hair started falling out in clumps, bunching up in the shower drain.
“I was crying hysterically,” said Rowe, 67, of Anna Maria, Fla.
Rowe, who was hospitalized for 12 days in April with symptoms of the coronavirus, soon found strikingly similar stories in online groups of COVID-19 survivors. Many said that several months after contracting the virus, they began shedding startling amounts of hair.
Doctors say they are seeing many more patients with hair loss, a phenomenon they believe is related to the coronavirus pandemic, affecting both people who had the virus and those who never became sick.
In normal times, some people shed noticeable amounts of hair after a profoundly stressful experience such as an illness, major surgery or emotional trauma.
Now, doctors say, many patients recovering from COVID19 are experiencing hair loss — not from the virus itself but from the physiological stress of fighting it off. Many people who never contracted the virus are also losing hair because of emotional stress from job loss, financial strain, deaths of family members or other developments stemming from the pandemic.
“There’s many, many stresses in many ways surrounding this pandemic, and we’re still seeing hair loss because a lot of the stress hasn’t gone away,” said Dr. Shilpi Khetarpal, an associate professor of dermatology at the Cleveland Clinic.
Before the pandemic, there were weeks when Khetarpal didn’t see a single patient with hair loss of this type. Now, she said, about 20 such patients a week come in.
For most patients the condition should be temporary, doctors say, but it could last months.
There are two types of hair loss the pandemic seems to be triggering, experts say.
In one condition, called telogen e±uvium, people shed much more than the typical 50 to 100 hairs per day, usually beginning several months after a stressful experience. It essentially involves a shifting or “tripping of the hair growth system,” said Dr. Sara Hogan, a dermatologist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been seeing up to seven patients a day with the condition.
The phenomenon typically lasts about six months, but if stressful situations persist or recur, some people develop a chronic condition, Hogan said.
The other hair loss condition that is increasing now is alopecia areata, in which the immune system attacks hair follicles, usually starting with a patch of hair on the scalp or beard, said Dr. Mohammad Jafferany, a psychiatrist and dermatologist at Central Michigan University.
“It is known to be associated with or exacerbated by psychological stress,” Jafferany said.
Experts don’t know exactly why stress triggers these conditions, which affect both women and men. It might be related to increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, or to effects on blood supply, Hogan said.
Experts recommend good nutrition, vitamins like biotin and stress-reduction techniques like yoga, scalp massage or mindfulness meditation. Some also recommend minoxidil, a hair growth drug, but Hogan warns patients that it can initially cause more hair loss before it starts