The expression “getting white hair” now has a scientific explanation. According to Harvard researchers, stress triggers an excessive transformation of stem cells into cells that produce the pigments in our hair. Too much stress would exhaust their number, and with it the number of colored hairs or hairs on our body.
Science now knows how a stressed person can literally get gray hair, even at a young age. Stress plays a role in it. Researchers at Harvard University today have proof of this and point it out in a publication in the journal Nature. Their initial questioning concerned the observable form that the effect of stress could take on our body. To answer this, they wanted to successfully demonstrate how stress could actually make our hair white or gray – namely, hair devoid of pigmentation.
American scientists have carried out several experiments on laboratory mice. To put them in stressful situations, they held them against their will or caused them pain. They then observed how the stress thus induced was translated after different physiological modifications. Suppressing the rodents’ immune defenses did not prevent their hair from bleaching. Removal of their adrenal glands – which synthesize one of the main stress hormones, cortisol – was again not enough to stop the phenomenon. However, by preventing the synthesis of another hormone, norepinephrine, the scientists also stopped the whitening of the hairs of the mice studied. This hormone plays a major role in the sympathetic nervous system, which activates when the body is in action, and, more specifically, in the context of a answer called “fight-flight.” “ The latter, identified on a large number of animals, is the natural reaction to external threats and initiates a fight or flight.
When stress takes on colors
The researchers later discovered that this secretion of norepinephrine triggered the differentiation of an abnormally high number of stem cells in the body. In the case of hair, it turns into cells producing pigments. Excess stress will, by force, deplete the “reservoir” of stem cells that our body has and therefore cells capable of giving color to our hair. This depletion of “pigment cells” takes place gradually with age but therefore increases with stress. “By precisely identifying the physiological consequences of stress, we open the way to a broader understanding of the effects of stress on our bodysaid study author and stem cell specialist at Harvard Ya-Chieh Hsu. This is a first step towards a possible treatment capable of stopping or reversing the negative impact of stress. “
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