Grey Hairs Can Be Reversed

Scientists in New York found that when people with Grey Hairs avoided stress, new hair growth was closer to their natural colour. The team took hairs from the heads of volunteers and created an imaging method that detects pigment throughout a hair, from base to tip.

Researchers said that the Stress-induced changes in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of each human cell, causes changes to hundreds of proteins in the hair, causing greying. The study has been led by experts at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, New York, who claim to have provided the first quantitative evidence linking psychological stress to greying hair in humans.

Professor Martin Picard, senior author of the study said that understanding the mechanisms that allow old Grey Hairs to return to their young pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human ageing in general and how it is influenced by stress.The researchers also added that the data add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human ageing is not a linear, fixed biological process but may, at least in part, be halted or even temporarily reversed. Reducing stress won’t turn hair into a normal colour no matter if you’re very young or very old.

The senior author also said that they don’t think that reducing stress in a 70-year-old who’s been grey for years will darken their hair or increasing stress in a 10-year-old will be enough to tip their hair over the grey threshold.  Hair starts growing at the bottom of a hair follicle, the tunnel-shaped structure in the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin.

At a young age, our hair is coloured by the pigments produced by cells in the hair follicle known as melanocytes. As we grow older, the melanocytes slowly become less active, so less pigment is produced, the colour fades, and Grey Hairs grows instead. For their study, the researchers analysed individual hairs from 14 volunteers, seven females and seven males with an average age of 35.