Healthy Living

It is a normal expression that you get gray hair from stress. But it also contains a ground of truth, as scientists from the American University of Harvard and the Brazilian University of São Paulo demonstrated. They blame stress hormones that penetrate into our hair roots and ensure that no color pigment is produced.

There are several reasons why someone turns grayer than another. Your genes play an important role, so you can already deduce a few things from the age at which your parents got gray hair. Your eating habits also seem to have an influence.

Color pigmentation disturbed

But stress also has a significant impact, the new study suggests, published in the leading science magazine Nature. The scientists discovered that the cause of this phenomenon lies with the so-called sympathetic nervous system, which connects the brain to the rest of the body and is activated when we are confronted with threatening situations.

In stressful situations this nervous system supplies the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline to our body. That noradrenaline, which among other things raises your blood pressure, appears to penetrate into the hair roots. There are the stem cells that are responsible for the production of melanin, the color pigments that determine our hair color. The noradrenaline appears to disrupt the process of melanin production, so that no color pigment is formed with new hairs, which makes those hairs gray.

Permanent damage

The scientists drew their conclusions based on experiments on mice, which were subjected to various forms of stress, for example by flashing light and lifting their cage. "The impact of stress was much greater than I expected," principal investigator Ya-Chieh Hsu said. "After a few days, all color pigment-forming stem cells in the mice were lost. And once they are gone, you can no longer create a color pigment. The damage is permanent."

Search for treatments

The findings can shed new light on the wider effects of stress on certain organs and tissues. The researchers hope that new studies can build on this to find treatments that can stop or reverse the harmful effects of stress.

Sources