Fabric of Hair Investigates: Is Hair Loss a Result of the Pandemic?🧐
There are two types of hair loss the pandemic seems to be triggering.
In one condition, called telogen effluvium, people shed much more than the typical 50-to-100 hairs per day, usually beginning several months after a stressful experience.
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, “people are shedding more, growing less, and up to 50 percent of hair might skip ahead to the shedding phase, with only about 40 percent in the growth phase.
The other hair loss condition that is increasing now is alopecia areata, in which the immune system attacks hair follicles, usually starting with a patch of hair on the scalp or beard.
This condition is known to be associated with or intensified by psychological stress.
The pandemic was a near perfect mass hair-loss event, and anyone with the most basic understanding of why peolpe experience hair fall could have spotted it from a mile away.
Throughout this pandemic, millions more have suffered devastating emotional stress even if they’ve never gotten sick: watching a loved one die, losing a job, going to work in life-threatening conditions, bearing the brunt of violent political unrest.
Feelings can have concrete, involuntary physical manifestations, and these traumas are exactly the kinds that leave people staring in horror at the handfuls of hair they gather while running a brush through their hair.
Overall, hair loss is a truly fascinating topic whose causes seem to range from pandemics to hair cells escaping their role in hair growth. As the nation’s scalps recover from the events of the past two years, the next step in hair loss research will be to confirm the mechanisms of hair loss, and deter its fall.🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡