How many times after a strong state of stress have we had to deal with a few more white hairs? The response of our body, as in any traumatic event, is almost immediate and even in case of fatigue or stress it can play tricks on us.
Find a few here and there graying hair it is not a good sign for some, who find the synonym of aging in the grizzled. That’s not entirely true, but you might as well be able to do without it. This is what has been discovered by a new study from Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan in New York that has tried to demonstrate how stress-induced gray hair they are not permanent.
In fact, by reducing or eliminating the source of stress that caused the graying, it would be possible to generate the growth of new hair of the natural color and stop the process. The discovery, described in the pages of the journal eLife, according to the authors provides new data to the “growing number of studies that show that human aging is not a linear and fixed biological process, but can, at least in part, be interrupted or even temporarily reversed“.
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In order to complete the study, the researchers analyzed the hair of 14 volunteers using an imaging method that allows them to study pigmentation from the base to the tip of the hair. Participants were asked to provide information on their level of stress, and the analysis revealed several associations between stress and graying of hair. In some cases, a reversal of the process was detected with the disappearance or reduction of stress. The researchers then measured the levels of thousands of proteins in the hair and their change in the length of each hair to understand how stress causes graying. They observed that stress-induced changes in the mitochondria, the “powerhouse” of every human cell, cause hundreds of proteins in hair to change, causing it to turn graying.
However, the scholars stressed that the discovery should not lead to think that “reducing stress in a seventy-year-old with gray or white hair for years will cause his hair to darken or vice versa, and that increasing stress in a 10-year-old child will be enough to it will make his hair gray. “