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Complex Numbers #1081547 added December 26, 2024 at 9:30am
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Gray Matters
Just about a month ago, I linked an article about going gray, in the entry "A Touch of Gray"  . The PopSci article proclaimed with great certainty that gray hair can never return to its original color. Well, here's SciAm going "nuh-uh" in 2021:
And here I thought the universal marker of aging was yelling at kids to get off your lawn.
As we grow older, black, brown, blonde or red strands lose their youthful hue.
Which is why investments in hair dye companies are likely to be lucrative.
Although this may seem like a permanent change, new research reveals that the graying process can be undone—at least temporarily.
Obviously, everything is temporary, especially if you're old enough to have gray hair in the first place.
Hints that gray hairs could spontaneously regain color have existed as isolated case studies within the scientific literature for decades.
Sometimes, all it takes to disprove a hypothesis is a single counter-example. Like if you said "all planets have moons," and then someone showed that Venus is a planet that doesn't have moons, your hypothesis would be broken. In biology, though, things aren't always that clean-cut, and a single counterexample could just be a fluke or a hoax.
In a study published today in eLife, a group of researchers provide the most robust evidence of this phenomenon to date in hair from around a dozen people of various ages, ethnicities and sexes.
While a sample size of around 12 also doesn't do much to make the findings definitive, this phenomenon is apparently rare enough that to expect a bigger sample would be wishful thinking.
It also aligns patterns of graying and reversal to periods of stress, which implies that this aging-related process is closely associated with our psychological well-being.
On this point, the article is in alignment with the one I posted last month.
Around four years ago Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University...
Now, that's someone who either hates Star Trek with a burning passion, or takes every opportunity to tell his underlings to "make it so."
...was pondering the way our cells grow old in a multistep manner in which some of them begin to show signs of aging at much earlier time points than others.
I don't really have anything to say about that process or the science behind it; I just wanted to make a Picard joke in an entry about hair.
These patterns revealed something surprising: In 10 of these participants, who were between age nine and 39, some graying hairs regained color.
So, this is highly unlikely to apply to older folks who go gray. Still, research like this might lead to a way to artificially restore hair melanin without dyes. Not that I care. I think I'd look awesome with a gray mane.
Most people start noticing their first gray hairs in their 30s—although some may find them in their late 20s.
That early? This surprises me, though I've known quite young gray-haired people. But one never knows: those who turn gray then could be dyeing their hair, or shaving it off entirely.
The team also investigated the association between hair graying and psychological stress because prior research hinted that such factors may accelerate the hair’s aging process. Anecdotes of such a connection are also visible throughout history: according to legend, the hair of Marie Antoinette, the 18th-century queen of France, turned white overnight just before her execution at the guillotine.
If true, for a queen, that had to add insult to injury.
Eventually, Picard says, one could envision hair as a powerful tool to assess the effects of earlier life events on aging—because, much like the rings of a tree, hair provides a kind of physical record of elapsed events.
Or, you know, a sorcerer could use it to control you. You never know. |
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