Bald men more prone to COVID-19: Study

By Masood Sattar Khan
(Pakistan News & Features Services) 

Bald men may be at higher risk of suffering from severe COVID-19 symptoms, emerging evidence has suggested. 

The link is so strong that some researchers are suggesting baldness should be considered a risk factor called the ‘Gabrin sign’ after the first US physician to die of Covid-19 in the United States, Dr Frank Gabrin, who was bald, The Telegraph reported.

"We really think that baldness is a perfect predictor of severity," the lead author of the key study professor Carlos Wambier of Brown University, told the newspaper. 

The data since the beginning of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, in January has shown that men are more likely to die after getting coronavirus. 

In the UK, a report this week from Public Health England found that working-age males were twice as likely as females to die after being diagnosed with COVID-19. 

In a study, 79 percent of the men suffering with COVID-19 in three Madrid hospitals were bald. The study of 122 patients, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, followed an earlier piece of work among 41 patients in Spanish hospitals, which found 71 percent were bald. 

The background rate of baldness in white men of a similar age to the patients studied was between 31-53 percent. Other scientists said that more work needed to be done but were excited by the potential link.