Quarter of coronavirus survivors report losing hair ‘in clumps’

A survey has found more than a quarter of people who survive COVID-19 are reporting hair loss with many saying their hair fall is “severe”.

Coronavirus survivors say they are experiencing “severe” hair loss after surviving the potentially deadly virus.

One online survey of 1500 survivors suggests more than a quarter of people experience some hair loss, with dozens of people on online survivor communities sharing photos of their scalps, saying their hair fall is extreme.

One survivor, Grace Dudley, 30, said her hair “started to fall out a couple of weeks ago in clumps”.

“I went to a trichologist for them to examine my hair and they told me that I was going to lose most if not all of it,” she said on a GoFundMe page.

“I asked why and they told me that I was so close to death from when I was in hospital with COVID that my body is going through the process of death and has taken all of the energy out of maintaining my hair into keeping me alive so now it all needs to fall out and regrow.”

Ms Dudley, who recently lost her father to COVID-19, said she’d been told it would take her about a year to regrow her hair, and until that time she was shaving her head for charity, and would be wearing wigs.

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Grace Dudley said her hair began falling out in clumps. Picture: GoFundMe

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“This virus just keeps kicking me down even three months later,” she wrote.

Ms Dudley, a makeup artist from Essex, said the hair loss began about a month after she was discharged from hospital, according to The Sun.

Another coronavirus survivor, Theresa Cabrera, told Yahoo News she’d been lucky to survive after being diagnosed with COVID-19. She spent a month in hospital and spent most of her time in hospital sedated and on a ventilator.

After being discharged in May she went home and took a shower and found her hair “came out in my hands”.

“Now, when I make a ponytail, it’s less than a quarter of what it used to be,” the New Jersey woman said. “It’s horrible.”

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Many survivors said their hair loss was severe and ongoing.

In a survey of more than 1500 people in the Survivor Corp Facebook group, 27 per cent of people recovering from coronavirus said they’d experienced hair loss.

People recovering from coronavirus have taken to online communities in places like Facebook and Reddit to share their experiences with one another, as there’s little published research about the long-term effects of coronavirus available for survivors.

Survivors have said their doctors have reassured them their hair loss is temporary and could be attributed to stress, or a condition called ‘telogen effluvium’.

Telogen effluvium (TE) is a temporary condition where people experience hair loss from a change in the number of hair follicles in the scalp. TE most often effects the top of the scalp and doesn’t usually cause the hairline to recede. Severe cases can cause hair loss of the eyebrows or other parts of the body.

It’s often diagnosed after an illness, a severe fever, a severe stressful event or severe weight loss.