Grey hair: Could it be caused by stress? Science has an answer
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The mice were exposed to three types of stress involving mild, short-term pain, psychological stress, and restricted movement. All caused noticeable loss of melanocyte stem cells and hair graying. Whatever the stressor, it can throw off the hair growth cycle.
Does Stress Cause Grey or White Hair?
He adds that stress can also decrease the availability of key nutrients needed for healthy hair growth, such as iron, vitamin C, vitamin D3 and zinc. "After just a few days, all of the pigment-regenerating stem cells were lost. Once they're gone, you can't regenerate pigments anymore,” she added. “The damage is permanent." Hair follicles have a storehouse of stem cells that can be converted into pigment cells when new hairs form, but the stockpile is limited. She theorized that a survival mechanism in animals is triggered by threats that stimulate the sympathetic nervous system to prepare them to run away or fight.
Men's Health
According to healthcare education company StatPearls, when the body is under stress, the hormone cortisol is released throughout the body, even the hair follicles. Once inside the hair follicle, Hill says the stress hormone causes the melanocytes in the dermal papilla — which houses all the cells that determine hair's characteristics, per the Journal of Dermatological Science — to die. When you are stressed, your body responds by releasing the neurotransmitter, noradrenaline as part of your “fight-or-flight" reaction. Under normal circumstances, pigment-producing stem cells remain inactive until new hair growth occurs. Using a mathematical model to expand their results across a greater number of people and ages, the team suggests that gray and white hairs can indeed regain their color in some circumstances. While this contradicts another study in mice, differences in hair follicle biology between mice and humans could explain the contradiction. Each slice, about 1/20th of a millimeter wide, represents about an hour of hair growth.
How to prevent hair loss
In more recent history, John McCain experienced severe injuries as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War — and lost color in his hair. Managing stress is a healthy goal regardless of its effect on how you look. Although aging is inevitable, it doesn't mean we can’t feel good about ourselves as the years go by. Taking care of our physical and mental health is something that will pay dividends in the long run.
Stress can turn hair gray -- and it's reversible, researchers find
You might ask your doctor to evaluate your medication and check your levels of iron and Vitamin D (especially if you live in an area with little sunlight or don’t go outside much) and other nutrients. This was the finding of a new study from a large international team. “People who report having experienced moderate to high stress over the long term have been shown to have changes in different brain structures that are important for memory and cognition,” adds Simone.
When it comes to our hair, stress is the second biggest cause of hair loss after genetics, but because the process usually takes anywhere between three and six months to happen, many people don’t make the connection. "When we started to study this, I expected that stress was bad for the body — but the detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined,” Hsu said. The relationship between stress and gray hair isn’t completely clear. But there is evidence that high levels of stress can make hair turn gray or white.
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For every person who embraces his or her gray hair, many more curse this very visible sign of aging. Based on mathematical modeling, Picard and his colleagues suggested that hair needs to reach a threshold to turn gray. In middle age, when a person is nearer that threshold, stress can push a hair over the line. During stressful times, people often credit “the job” or “the kids” for their premature grays. While some may be only joking, there’s some truth to the theory. “There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,” Picard says.
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During the anagen phase, which lasts 2 to 6 years or longer, the hair grows. During the catagen phase, which lasts about 3 months, the hair rests. Then, at the end of the telogen (shedding) phase, the hair falls out and is replaced by new hair. When graying begins usually is determined by genes, so if your mother or father became gray early, you may, too. If you are one of those people who don't find gray hair distinguished, you can easily cover your gray with one of the many different hair dyes available.
How to regain stress-induced hair loss
This makes the hair grow translucent, without any pigment, appearing white. Gray and white hair is typically caused by the pigment cells in our hair follicles slowly dying off as we get older, which means there's a lack of the pigment melanin. However, there's some evidence that other factors can influence melanin production too. Elaborate sympathetic innervation (magenta) around melanocyte stem cells (yellow).
"Our data add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human aging is not a linear, fixed biological process but may, at least in part, be halted or even temporarily reversed." Former President Barack Obama is pictured at the beginning of his presidency in January 2009 (left) and at the end, during President Donald Trump’s inauguration eight years later. Harvard researchers, for the first time, have discovered how stress turns hair gray.
The team’s first step was to identify proteins that show if a strand was gray, white, or colored—at any point in its history. She emphasizes that people have more control over stress and aging than they realize. “It's interesting to note that it is the perception of stress that is important. So if we feel we have the resources to handle the situation we're less likely to experience chronic stress." That said, if you are going gray prematurely, it wouldn’t hurt to go have a checkup just in case natural genetic factors aren’t the sole culprit.
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