Former Director Grade Scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India
www.daylife.page
According to modern Science it is "yes". Weeks back I wrote scientific article “What brings stress in terms of human health” describing that “Everyone experiences stress and each one deals with it differently. It affects almost every system of our body.” There's a long-held belief that graying hair is more than just an issue of time and age — it's a marker of lived experience. But can a person's life experience really change their hair colour? Science suggests it's possible that while hair colour naturally wanes over time, certain factors may speed up that change — including stress.
Stress causing factors are not something special; they are embedded in our daily routine, environmental and economic conditions. When the body is under stress, it leads to changes in hormones due to this there would be changes in the hormone targeted organs. Stress is a normal reaction to everyday pressures, but it can become unhealthy when it upsets a person's day-to-day function. Severe stress can lead to sudden, temporary weakening and dysfunction of the important organs such as heart and brain which may lead to serious complications such as ischemia to the heart, High blood pressure, anxiety due to this palpitations, chest pressure, insomnia, dry mouth, panic attacks including sudden death.
Stress isn't the primary cause of graying — genes largely dictate when people go gray —- but "stress may accelerate" the graying process, said David Kingsley, a researcher into hair loss. Even indirect stress, such as malnutrition, thyroid issues, hormonal imbalance and anemia, may impact hair pigmentation, he said.
Those who works with mice said, stress can deplete hair-pigmenting cells known as melanocytes(pigment producing cells), according to a 2020 study. In human also melanocytes stop dividing indefinitely and therefore with the stem cell permanently changed, the follicle no longer had a source of new pigment cells. That strand of hair — or in the mouse's case, fur — lost its source of colour.
While those findings can't necessarily be applied to humans, a 2021 study in the journal eLife found that stress can also cause hair to turn gray in humans — except the change isn't always permanent.
Participants with some gray hairs or "two-colored hairs" — gray and pigmented in the same strand — were asked to log their experiences and stress levels over recent months. They found that stressful experiences such as a job loss were linked to graying. However, on removing the stress, the graying could reverse.
"There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person's head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,"
Clearly more than genetics determines when a hair turns gray. Not only is there a wide variation in when people gray, from their 30s all the way to their 80s, but "every hair has the same genome, is exposed to the same stuff". "So, why do some gray earlier and some later?", still science could not answer satisfactorily.
Based on mathematical modelling, Picard and his colleagues suggested that hair needs to reach a threshold to turn gray. In middle age, when a person is nearer that threshold, stress can push a hair over the line.
Melanocyte stem cells become more vulnerable as they age, he said. So added stress potentially "changes the timing" of graying, he said.
Picard and his co-authors suggested that it may be possible to reverse graying hair in someone who has recently gone gray. For someone who has had gray hair for years, however, removing stress is unlikely to cause their locks to rebound to their original colour, as the hair has gone well past the graying threshold.
In practice, hair doesn't often recover its pigment. Reverse graying is also more common in patients being treated for a hair loss condition, rather than people who are graying normally, he said.
Ideally, a follow-up prospective study would be next. Researchers would follow participants for months, recording their experiences and measuring their stress hormones via saliva before analyzing their hair strands. However, this is not yet in the works.
Still, the key message stands. "What we do has a material impact on things we used to think were irreversible like hair graying," Picard said. (The author has his own study and views)
