In recent days, there has been talk on social networks about an alleged side effect of COVID-19 that would cause alterations in the nails in the form of horizontal grooves, and which some are calling "COVID nails".
The issue was raised by a post on Twitter by British epidemiologist Tim Spector, a researcher at the COVID Symptom Study, an app developed to study the effects of the disease.
"
COVID nails
are increasingly being recognized as nails recover after infection," he wrote.
Can it be said that these nail changes are an indicator that a person had COVID-19?
The short answer is that there is no evidence to know if this is really an effect of the coronavirus.
This nail condition was first described in 1846 by the French physician Joseph Honoré Simon Beau, hence its name, Beau's lines. Several experts and medical professionals explain that the grooves are not necessarily a consequence of COVID-19. "There is no data in this regard to know if this is really a consequence of the infection," epidemiologist Sandra Albrecht, a researcher and professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University in New York, explained to Noticias Telemundo.
Nail grooves can develop after the body experiences great stress, explains Albrecht.
And while they may appear after a stressful condition such as COVID-19 infection, "many people have also been experiencing many other types of stress during the pandemic that could also cause this condition," he added.
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According to the Mayo Clinic, these lines appear when the growth of the nail is interrupted by an injury or illness that produces a high fever, such as measles, pneumonia and mumps.
They can also occur in cases of uncontrolled diabetes or influenza, and can even be a sign of a lack of zinc in the body.
Several studies have detected Beau's lines in the nails of deep-sea divers and in people who spent time at high altitudes, in this case members of an expedition to the Himalayas in Nepal.
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"Many different diseases and infections can cause changes to the nails," Esther Freeman, director of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and researcher on a project that tracks possible dermatological reactions to COVID-19, told The Washington Post.
Freeman explained to the newspaper that a "relatively small proportion" of doctors and health professionals have reported unusual nail conditions among patients who suffered from the virus.
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For her part, Dr. Albrecht explained that these types of nail lines should not be used as a way to diagnose if someone has had a COVID-19 infection.
"This could indicate who has been under a lot of stress but it will not necessarily tell you if that stress is related to COVID-19 infection," he said.
In a 2013 study, Colombian geriatric physician Mauricio Ocampo studied the case of a 77-year-old woman who developed Beau's lines after suffering from pneumonia.
In this study, Ocampo explains that as nails grow about one millimeter between every six and ten days, the distance between the groove and the lower edge of the nail can help determine when the stressful event that originated it occurred. .
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An article published in the medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine describes the appearance of multiple Beau's lines on the nails of a patient with cancer, and it was determined that they corresponded to the beginning of each chemotherapy cycle, "being the distance between the lines proportional to the interval between cycles ".