A 22-year-old woman “witnessed a tragedy of a woman’s throat being cut and the victim falling dead at her feet,” according to a physician at the London Temperance Hospital. The next day, the right side of her pubic hair turned white, while the left half remained black. example of an otherwise common occurrence: gray hairs seem to accumulate when we’re stressed.
stress could turn hair snow white, instead arguing the change must be triggered by chemicals or strange immune system behavior. Rare cases where doctors observed the rapid whitening—like in the 1902, may put some of these arguments to rest. In the study, stem cell and regenerative biologists from the United States and Brazil reported that stress can indeed cause hair to lose its pigment—and they identified a cellular pathway by which it can occur.
To study this vexing relationship, the researchers created an elaborate animal model, which basically involved trying to turn black-haired rats white with lab-made stressors. They tried three different tactics: restraint stress, chronic unpredictable stress, and nociception-induced stress, which is caused by physical pain . Each successfully turned the rat’s hair white.
Having identified the optimal way to make a rat panic, the team began searching for corresponding changes in the physiological pathways that give rise to coat color. They were particularly interested in the behaviors of two types of cells: differentiated melanocytes, which produce pigment in the hair and skin, and melanocyte stem cells, the raw material from which melanocytes develop.
For five days after the injection, the rats’ coats remained black. The differentiated melanocytes in the hair bulb continued to pump out color. But in many follicles, the overtaxed melanocyte stem cells were “completely lost,” the researchers report. Pushed by a flood of noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter that surges in response to stress, the existing stem cells proliferated so quickly that they completely disappeared from their niche.
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