![]() “They would denounce it and say things like, ‘I don’t really know if that’s the case’ or ‘I’ve never heard of that.’” She did her own research, but whenever she would bring up the tie between COVID-19 and hair loss, she says she was shut down. “I was taking a shower and a big chunk fell out while I was shampooing.” -Mya Geans Mya GeansĪfter her dad took the picture of her bald spots, Hannah says she felt like she was being gaslit by her doctors. “I would tell people that my hair’s falling out, and they would say something like, ‘Oh, hair loss is normal, we lose 500 hairs a day,’ but what I was dealing with was not normal,” she tells me. Nicole, a 31-year-old from Austin, Texas, thought she was out of her mind because no one was taking her seriously. “And there was nothing I could really do about it. “For me, losing my hair was really devastating,” she says. When she started noticing clumps in the shower, she was terrified-and also felt a bit ashamed. Still, COVID-19-related hair loss isn’t widely discussedĬatrina*, a 32-year-old from New Jersey, says she’s frustrated that COVID-19-related hair loss isn’t talked about more. Yet both Mya and Monica are dealing with COVID-19-related hair loss. Monica, a 28-year-old from New Jersey, dealt with body aches, she was tired all the time, and she lost her sense of smell and taste, but those initial symptoms lasted only 14 days and she was never hospitalized. The range of experiences was on display among the people I spoke with: Mya Geans, a 20-year-old from Phoenix, was in the hospital for days after her oxygen levels dropped dangerously low she developed double pneumonia in both her lungs. For most people, the hair loss isn’t permanent, but the excessive shedding can last around six to nine months before it stops. “When you’re experiencing stress-related hair loss and your hairs are being pushed prematurely into the resting phase, you could lose up to 50 percent or 70 percent of your hair at a time, instead of the typical 10 percent,” says Timmons. Normally, the average healthy human has 10 percent of all their hairs in the resting phase, and they shed those hairs about every three months. Doctors call this type of hair loss telogen effluvium (“telogen” is another word for the resting phase), or TE. Our cortisol levels spike when our bodies are extremely stressed out, causing a hormonal imbalance that can push hair strands out of the growing phase and, eventually, into the resting phase way faster than normal. ![]() “There’s a growing phase, a transitional phase, a resting phase, and then your hair naturally sheds out of the follicle,” she explains. We have four phases in our hair cycle, says Kendra Timmons, a board-certified trichologist based in Arlington, Texas. ![]() For example, if COVID-19 negatively impacts your thyroid, it can also create a hormonal imbalance that triggers excessive hair loss. “It is unclear if the increase in cases is more closely related to the physiological toll of infection or extreme emotional stress,” said one of the study’s coauthors.Īnd even though COVID-19 is technically a respiratory virus, it can impact many organs. A recent study shows that there was a 400 percent spike this past summer in COVID-19-related hair loss in a racially diverse neighborhood in NYC. It could be caused by the intense stress your body goes through when it’s fighting the virus or by the emotional, mental, and physical stress of dealing with COVID-19 symptoms or trying to stay afloat during a pandemic. The medical community isn’t one hundred percent sure there’s a single reason behind hair loss in COVID-19 long-haulers. They’re still kind of a mystery- experts don’t know why they’re still dealing with symptoms or how to put those symptoms to an end. Think: shortness of breath, head-splitting migraines, a prolonged loss of their sense of taste and smell. These are the people who are still dealing with COVID-19 symptoms months after they’ve tested negative for the virus. She’s also a member of another group-experts call them the COVID-19 long-haulers. Hannah believes that she contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 (she doesn’t have a positive test to prove it because testing wasn’t widely available at the time) she’s one of the 30 million people who’ve been diagnosed with the virus in the U.S. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m literally going bald.’” “I had a mini panic attack,” she tells me over Zoom. ![]() He snapped a picture of the back of her head-there were bald patches everywhere. In June 2020, Hannah (who wants to be identified only by her first name) was standing outside of her family home with her dad when he told her to stand still.
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