Ask Well
I went through a tough time hair
has since become much result of the stress?
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It's natural to assume that
stress contributes to gray hair. Just look at the various presidents who left
office with many more silvery strands than when they went in.
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But if you dig into the research,
you'll find that few studies on the topic exist. And while some have found
associations between premature graying and stress, no research has proved the
link.
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"There's still a lot we
don't know," said Dr. Paradi Mirmirani, a dermatologist at the Kaiser
Permanente Vallejo Medical Center in Northern California.
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In past studies, researchers have
asked participants to fill out questionnaires about their hair color and stress
levels, and then the scientists would see if they could link them.
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In one study published in 2016,
for instance, scientists surveyed more than 1,100 young Turkish adults and
found that the 315 who reported prematurely graying hair had higher stress
levels than those who didn't. (Those with premature graying also had histories
of alcohol use and chronic disease, and they had parents who went gray at a
young age.)
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But a mouse study published in
2020 took the research a step forward. In it, researchers stressed mice in
various ways, including by injecting them with a chili-pepper-like chemical
that induced a "fight-or-flight" response. This caused them to
release the stress hormone norepinephrine, which, in turn, depleted their hair
follicles of the stem cells involved with adding pigment to mouse fur. The hair
then grew in gray. The researchers demonstrated similar effects of high levels
of norepinephrine on human stem cells in a lab as well, supporting the idea
that the stress hormone is linked with graying in humans, said Ya-Chieh Hsu, a professor
of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, and one of the
authors of this research.
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But studies on this topic are
challenging to perform on people. One small human study published in 2021 still
advanced the narrative: Researchers plucked various strands of hair from 14
volunteers who had at least some graying. Several of the strands were fully
gray, some were partially gray and some hadn't grayed at all. The scientists
then created high-resolution digital images of the hairs and calculated when
each strand went gray using estimates of how quickly hair grows.
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They also asked the particpants
to plot out stressful experiences from the past year on a timeline, and rank
them. The researchers found that when a strand turned gray frequently
corresponded with the most stressful moments.
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This was the first time a study
linked specific stressful events with the moment hair began to gray, said
Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia
University and an author of the study.
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It offered "our first real
evidence that maybe stress does, in fact, play a role for some people,"
said Dr. Victoria Barbosa, an associate professor of dermatology at the
University of Chicago.
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If such preliminary research
continues to identify stress-related changes that cause hair graying, it may
one day lead to treatments that can repigment hair, Dr. Mirmirani said. But we
still need more and larger human studies to confirm the links, Dr. Barbosa
said.
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Future research might also help
explain why stress is linked with hair graying in some people, but not in
others, said Dr. Sind-huja Sominidi Damodaran, a dermatologist at the Mayo
Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
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It's also too soon to know if
easing stress could slow down or reverse premature graying.
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For most people, genetics is the
main driver of hair graying, Dr. Barbosa said. If you have a parent who went
gray at a young age, you're likely to as well.
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Certain medical conditions can
cause hair to lose pigment prematurely, Dr. Barbosa said. Those include
vitiligo, which causes patches of skin to lose color, and alopecia areata, a
type of hair loss. An over- or underactive thyroid and chemotherapy treatments
can also contribute to premature graying, Dr. Damodaran said. Deficiencies in
iron, calcium and the vitamins B12 and D are correlated with going gray early
too, she said, as are obesity and smoking.
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Dr. Barbosa said that she likes
to use graying as an opportunity to talk with her patients about accepting
graying as a natural part of aging.
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This can be especially liberating
for women, she said, since "graying has always been socially more
acceptable for men."
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Sarah Klein
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