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SASKATOON – Not a fan of your salt and pepper look? Well, there might be a solution that doesn’t involve turning to dark shoe polish.
A new small-scale study not only shows strong evidence that psychological stress is linked to graying hair, but that the process is potentially reversible.
The team at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, which published their results in the journal eLife last week, were surprised to find that hair color can be restored when stressors are removed.
“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hair to regain its ‘young’ pigmented state could provide new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” said Martin Picard. , lead author of the study. Science Daily publication.
“Our data adds to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human aging is not a linear, fixed biological process, but can, at least in part, be stopped or even temporarily reversed,” Picard, associate professor of medicine behavioral at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, added.
But the authors warned that re-pigmentation was only possible for some.
Most people start to notice their first gray hair in their 30s or late 20s and the team said this is when the process is most reversible. Those who are older and perhaps already have a full head of gray hair are probably out of luck no matter how much psychological stress they reduce in their lives.
But the authors say it’s possible that some hair follicles are altered by reduced stress.
A NEW PROCESS ALLOWED TO LIGHT UP
Contrary to popular belief, hair does not turn gray after growing out of the follicle – little pocket-like holes in our skin on the top of the head. Instead, the authors explained that when the hairs are under the skin, they are subject to the influence of internal chemical processes and stress hormones.
And although psychological stress has long been believed to accelerate graying, it has been difficult for scientists in general to correlate periods of stress with changes in hair pigmentation in a single follicle.
But the researchers in this latest study say they are the first to offer quantitative evidence for the link. And the main reason is because of Ayelet Rosenberg, the study’s first author and student in Picard’s lab.
She has developed a new method of capturing highly detailed images of tiny slices of human hair. Each slice, which is about 1 / 20th of a millimeter wide, represents about an hour of hair growth. This precision therefore greatly enhanced their ability to identify subtle and almost imperceptible changes in hair pigmentation.
The team analyzed the individual hairs of 14 volunteers and compared the results with entries from stress diaries that participants kept for the experiments. Volunteers were asked to catalog and rate their stress levels each week.
It was through these journals that the researchers were able to directly compare hair samples with documented examples of stress in their lives. In the case of one person, for example, Picard stated that he was gone on vacation, “and five hairs on that person’s head turned black again during the vacation, synchronized in time.”
But one of the problems with the study, which was also pointed out by some experts in American scientist, is the need for more data because the sample size was relatively small.
The researchers also looked at the expression levels of thousands of proteins in hair and how those values changed as hair grew. They found that when hair color changed one way or the other, there was an observable change in around 300 proteins.
The team said their mathematical model suggests that stress-induced changes in mitochondria, which act like tiny antennae inside the cell that respond to different signals, including stress, help explain why gray hair is changing.
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