If you are, in fact, lacking in a certain vitamin or mineral that’s associated with hair health-Dr. You can also consider getting tested for nutrient deficiencies to ensure that’s not exacerbating the situation. That means avoiding heat styling and/or using the lowest temperature whenever you do, minimizing intense chemical processes such as highlighting and straightening, and avoiding tight hairstyles that put tension on the hair. You want to make sure that you’re doing everything you can to minimize the risk of losing any more hair, Dr. “Typically, the best thing to do is simply wait it out.” In the meantime, practicing healthy hair habits is paramount. “Though losing hair can be scary, I always reassure patients that they won’t go bald from COVID-related shedding,” Dr. This isn’t a gradual type of hair loss or subtle hair thinning-it’s an acute, intense, sudden shedding that can leave your hair feeling less full overall and often manifests as noticeable thinness and sparseness along the sides of the temples. He adds that people tend to notice it when they see large clumps in their hands after washing their hair, see lots of hair in the shower drain, or notice that their brush or comb is filling up much faster than normal. “We all lose about 100 hairs per day on average, but in the case of telogen effluvium, you’re suddenly losing way more than that,” Dr. When telogen effluvium occurs, the hair loss is rapid. (Although one study found that the onset of COVID-related telogen effluvium can be a bit faster, sometimes within two months after the initial infection.) 3 So you may be completely recovered from your COVID-19 infection, feeling back to normal, and then a few months later your hair may start falling out. Telogen effluvium usually doesn’t occur at the same time as the triggering event, though-it starts approximately three months after, Dr. After a few weeks, the hair on your head may seem thinner or finer. Initially, you may notice hair all over your bathroom floor or an excessive amount in your hairbrush. Telogen effluvium is defined by a few key factors. In fact, a 2020 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that the instance of telogen effluvium in a New York City neighborhood with a high number of COVID-19 cases increased by over 400% in the neighborhood as a whole during the first few months of the pandemic. Bhanusali, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City specializing in hair loss, tells SELF. Postpartum hair loss in people who have given birth is another example of telogen effluvium, in this case caused by hormonal changes.ĬOVID-19 presents a bit of a double whammy because people are dealing with not only the physical stress the illness puts on the body, but also the mental anxiety that can come with being diagnosed with the virus, Dhaval G. Stress that triggers telogen effluvium can be either physical-in the case of a car accident or major surgery, or after other illnesses such as the flu-or emotional, such as a particularly difficult breakup or the death of a loved one, Dr. But with telogen effluvium, more than 30% of the follicles are in the resting phase, after which all of those “resting” hairs fall out at the same time, resulting in widespread shedding or hair loss. Under normal conditions, anywhere from 5 to 10% of the hair on the scalp is in the resting phase. “What happens in telogen effluvium is that a systemic change in the body abruptly pushes a large percentage of the hair that’s in the growth phase into the resting phase,” Dr. 4 At any given point in time, all of the hairs on your head are in different phases. Hair follicles go through three phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen, also known as the growth, transitional, and resting or shedding phases. In order to understand what’s happening, it’s important to first have a basic understanding of the hair growth cycle. Again, “the type of hair loss caused by COVID-19 is called telogen effluvium, a prolonged hair shedding that occurs in response to a sudden stressor,” she says. However, it’s not SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, that’s causing the hair loss, but rather the stress your body is under when fighting it, Helena Kuhn, MD, assistant professor of dermatology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, tells SELF. According to one 2020 study in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, approximately 1 in 10 people infected with COVID-19 experienced hair shedding after the fact other data in JAAD International found that it occurred in more than 66% of those who contracted the virus.
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