Sorry Mom and Dad: It turns out you might not have been exaggerating when you told us your children made your hair turn gray.
Stress may play a key role in just how quickly hair goes from colored to ashen, a studyTrusted Source published this past week in the journal Nature suggests.
Scientists have long understood some link is possible between stress and gray hair, but this new research from Harvard University in Massachusetts more deeply probes the exact mechanisms at play.
The researchers’ initial tests looked closely at cortisol, the “stress hormone” that surges in the body when a person experiences a “fight or flight” response.
It’s an important bodily function, but the long-term presence of heightened cortisol is linked to a host of negative health outcomes.
But the culprit ended up being a different part of the body’s fight or flight response — the sympathetic nervous system.
These nerves are all over the body, including making inroads to each hair follicle, the researchers reported.
Chemicals released during the stress response — specifically norepinephrine — causes pigment producing stem cells to activate prematurely, depleting the hair’s “reserves” of color.
“The detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined,” Ya-Chieh Hsu, PhD, a lead study author and an associate professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard, said in a press release. “After just a few days, all of the pigment-regenerating stem cells were lost. Once they’re gone, you can’t regenerate pigments anymore. The damage is permanent.”