Actress Alyssa Milano is open about her battle with COVID-19, saying she is now experiencing hair loss due to the coronavirus. In a video posted on Twitter on Sunday, Milano brushed through her hair to show it was falling out, in clogs.
“Thought I would show you what # Covid19 does to your hair. Please take this seriously,” Milano wrote in the title.
She shared the video to spread a simple message. “Wear a damn mask,” she said.
The actress is not the only person reporting hair loss as a result of COVID-19. Although not a symptom on the CDC’s official list, a recent survey found that about 26% of people with long-term coronavirus symptoms experience hair loss.
The survey was conducted by Survivor Corps, a group that supplies resources to coronavirus survivors. The group asked more than 1,500 patients to report any symptoms they had, including those not on the CDC list such as weight gain, clogged ears and hair loss.
The researchers found that “symptoms of COVID-19 from long-distance carriers are far more numerous than what is currently on the CDC’s website,” the study read. More than 400 respondents said they experience hair loss.
Many people in the Facebook group Survivor Corps have opened up about their hair loss after their field battles COVID-19, and asked others for advice. In July, one woman posted that since her diagnosis with COVID-19 in March, her hair had fallen out in “massive clogs!”
Dr Shilpi Khetarpal, a dermatologist at Cleveland Clinic, said there have been an increased number of reports of hair loss from COVID-19 patients. According to Cleveland Clinic, a phenomenon called telogen effluvium is to blame. It is a form of non-scarring hair loss that results from an abnormal shift in follicular cycle.
There is generally a two- to three-month delay between a stressful event and the onset of hair loss, and that is “why we are seeing these patients now, several weeks after resolving COVID-19 symptoms,” Khetarpal said. .
According to an earlier Instagram post, Milano sometimes started feeling coronavirus symptoms in March. Last week, she shared a photo of herself taken on April 2, after being sick for two weeks. “I had never been this kind of sick before. Everything hurt. Loss of smell. It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. I could not inhale. I could not keep food in me. I lost 9 pounds in 2 weeks. .I was “Short class. Short of low grade. And the headache was terrible. I have basically all the Covid symptoms,” she wrote in the post.
Milano said after first testing negative for coronavirus and antibodies, she continued to have symptoms for four months – “like, vertigo, stomach abnormalities, irregular periods, palpitations, shortness of breath, zero short-term memory, and general malaise. “- so she took another antibody test. It came back positive, which means she actually had COVID-19.
“I just want you to be aware that our test system is faulty and that we do not know the real numbers. I also want you to know, this disease is not a hoax. I thought I was dying. It felt like dying,” she wrote in ‘ the title of Instagram. “I will donate my plasma with the hope that I can save a life. Please take care of yourself. Please be your hands and wear a mask and social distance. I do not want anyone to feel the way I felt.”
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