Clinicians are increasingly seeing an influx of patients experiencing an alarming side effect after COVID-19: hair loss.Dr. Brian Abittan, director of skin and hair rejuvenation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, told MedPage Today that he sees several patients each week who report hair loss after COVID-19.A study published in the journal Nature Medicine last month found that hair loss was one of a wide range of symptoms that patients reported to their treating physicians after being infected with COVID.Patients with a history of COVID infection were nearly four times more likely to suffer hair loss than those who were not infected, the researchers found.In addition, 22% of patients hospitalized with COVID experienced hair loss after the disease, according to a study published in the journal Lancet.The most common type of hair loss seen in patients after COVID is telogen effluvium.Hair loss occurs when the hair growth cycle is disrupted due to trauma such as surgery, illness, or any stressful life event such as moving or pregnancy. There are three phases that hair goes through during the growth cycle: anagen, catagen and telogen.Anagen is the active growth phase, catagen is the transitional phase, and telogen is the resting phase during which hair falls out.Telogen occurs when most of the hair on the scalp goes into the resting phase, which causes it to fall out more quickly. Normally, patients lose about 100 hairs a day, Abittan says.But with telogen effluvium, patients can lose up to 300, 500 or even 1,000 hairs each day, he added.Hair can begin to fall out as early as two to three months after infection, noted Dr. Alexis Young, a dermatologist at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. This phenomenon can last up to six months, and it usually takes about a year and a half for the hair to regrow, she added.
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