It is now proven: hair can turn gray prematurely due to intense stress. Explanations.
Why does our hair turn white? Is it just related to aging? To find out, scientists subjected mice to different types of stress.
White hair: concerns or aging?
White hair is usually visible signs of aging. However, when a person is worried and has problems, we usually say that they “ has white hair “. Simple popular expression or scientific reality?
Is hair depigmentation linked to stress? © waewkid
To find out, researchers from the Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases (CRID) in Sao Paulo and Harvard University conducted a study on mice. Published on January 22, 2020 in the scientific journal Natureit allows us to know how the scientists went about it and what conclusions they were able to draw from their different experiments(1).
Whitening that is neither linked to the immune system nor to excess cortisol
To find out if hair depigmentation is linked to stress, scientists first looked at whether pain was to blame. After causing an immune attack on the mice’s stem cells which control pigmentation, they noticed that the hairs turned white even on rodents lacking immune cells.
Since cortisol is the stress hormone, the researchers removed the adrenal gland that secretes it to see how the mice reacted. They then noticed that under the effect of stress, the animals’ hair turned gray.
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The nerves involved
Eventually, scientists discovered a link between the nervous system and melanocytes, stem cells that pigment the skin, hair or feathers. Indeed, when the nerves are activated during a stressful situation, they cause a depletion of melanocytes which then leads to whitening.
A discovery which explains why some people very quickly find themselves with white hair after intense stress.. This was for example the case of Queen Marie-Antoinette who, the day before her beheading, found her hair completely white. Same thing for Barack Obama whose hair turned gray shortly before his election.
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Banner illustration: Woman worried about finding white hair – © Alliance Images
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