Apandemic side effect: More people reportedly losing hair from the stress
Annrene Rowe was getting ready to celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary when she noticed a bald spot on her scalp. In the following days, her hair started falling out in clumps.
Rowe, who was hospitalized 12 days with symptomsof the coronavirus, found similar stories in online groups of COVID-19 survivors.
Doctors say they too are seeing many more patients with hair loss, a phenomenon they believe is indeed 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. Now, doctors say, many patients recovering from COVID-19 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 devastating developments stemming from the pandemic.
In a July survey about POST-COVID symptoms among 1,567 members
of a survivors’ group, 423people reported unusual hair loss, according to the group, Survivor Corps, andnatalie Lambert, an associate research professor at Indianauniversity School ofmedicine, who helped conduct the survey.
There are two types of hair loss the pandemic seems to be triggering, experts say.
In one condition, called telogen effluvium, people shed much more than the typical 50 to 100 hairs per day. In healthy hair cycles, most hairs are in a growing phase, with a small percentage in a short resting phase and only about 10 percent of hairs in a shedding or telogen phase. But with telogen effluvium, up to 50 percent of hair might skip ahead to the shedding phase, with only about 40 percent in the growth phase. The phenomenon typically lasts about six months, but if stressful situations persist or recur, some people develop a chronic shedding condition.
The other hair loss condition that is increasing now is alopecia areata, in which the immune systemattacks hair follicles. With alopecia areata, some cases resolve without treatment and some are helped by steroid injections, but some can become permanent.
Dr. Emma Guttman-yassky, the incoming chair of the dermatology department atmount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, said said that she has seen “a huge increase in this type of alopecia ” and has treated many front-line medical workers for hair loss, including her hospital’s employees.
“Some of them had COVID, but not all of them,” she said. “It’s the stress of the situation. They were apart from their families. They worked for many hours.”
She said the ones who did have COVID-19 progressed very quickly from one or two bald patches to “losing hair all over the body,” including eyebrows and eyelashes. She said that might be because the storm of inflammation that some COVID patients experience elevates immunemolecules linked to conditions like alopecia.