More Than Hair Loss: Global Perspectives on the Clinical Diagnosis and Management of Alopecia Areata

Dr Nekma Meah is a Consultant Dermatologist with a specialist interest in the management of hair and scalp disorders. She has undertaken an international hair fellowship under Professor Rodney Sinclair in Australia in 2017 and published extensively including co-leading The Alopecia Areata Consensus of Experts (ACE) study and the Global eDelphi Exercise to Identify Core Domains and Domain Items for the Development of a Global Registry of Alopecia Areata Disease Severity and Treatment Safety (GRASS) project. She runs the specialist hair clinic at St Helens and Knowsley NHS Trust and is currently the Honorary Secretary of the British Hair and Nail Society.

She obtained her MBChB from the University of Manchester in 2007 and undertook her junior doctor training in the West Midlands before entering the specialist dermatology programme in Liverpool. She qualified as a Consultant Dermatologist in 2017.

Dr Meah is passionate about dermatology, teaching and research and helped to establish the BHNS national hair and nail teaching day for dermatology trainees in 2021. She is Honorary Clinical Lecturer at The University of Manchester and serves on the steering committee for the global COVID-19 alopecia registry – SECURE alopecia.

Dr. Dmitri Wall is a consultant Dermatologist with a special interest in hair disorders. A graduate of University College Dublin, Ireland, he completed higher specialist training with the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland before undertaking an international hair fellowship in Melbourne, Australia with Professor Rodney Sinclair. Since his return in 2019, he has worked as a consultant in St James’s Hospital, Dublin, Ireland and Hair Restoration Blackrock, Dublin, Ireland.

Dr. Wall is Assistant Professor in the Charles Institute of Dermatology, University College Dublin School of Medicine. He is actively engaged in both basic scientific and clinical research with national and international colleagues, focusing primarily on hair and scalp disorders and has published in a number of journals. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Irish Association of Dermatologists (IAD) and is also a member of the British Association of Dermatologists, European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, International Society of Dermatology, Australasian Hair and Wool Research Society and the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery.

Dr. Wall also has a special interest in health informatics. He has obtained an MSc through Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and has worked with Professor Alan Irvine and the Irish Skin Foundation charity, over the last decade, to develop the not-for-profit charity National and International Skin Registries (NISR), that develops international patient registries, including a role in the development of the emerging global network of patient registries for alopecia areata (GRASS) with a view to improving international collaboration and facilitating re-use of comparable clinical data.

Most recently Dr. Wall has worked with colleagues internationally to establish two global, physician-entered, anonymized patient registries, SECURE-AD (Alan Irvine – Ireland, Carsten Flohr – United Kingdom, Phyllis Spuls – The Netherlands) and SECURE – Alopecia (Rodney Sinclair – Australia; Nekma Meah – United Kingdom; Katherine York – South Africa; Alan Irvine – Ireland), to record and analyze outcomes of COVID-19 positive patients suffering from atopic dermatitis and all forms of alopecia, respectively.