Eventually, they were able to find 14 people-men and women ranging from nine to 65 years old with various ethnic backgrounds (although the majority were white). Picard and his team began searching for others with two-colored hairs through local ads, on social media and by word of mouth. “She went to the bathroom and actually plucked a couple-that’s when this project started,” he says. Unexpectedly, however, his partner turned to him and said she had seen such two-colored hairs on her head. “I was thinking about this almost as a fictive idea,” Picard recalls. While discussing these ideas with his partner, Picard mentioned something in passing: if one could find a hair that was only partially gray-and then calculate how fast that hair was growing-it might be possible to pinpoint the period in which the hair began aging and thus ask the question of what happened in the individual’s life to trigger this change. Maybe the hairs that turn white first are the more vulnerable or least resilient.” “It seemed like the hair, in a way, recapitulated what we know happens at the cellular level,” Picard says. This patchwork process, he realized, was clearly visible on our head, where our hairs do not all turn gray at the same time. These findings suggest “that there is a window of opportunity during which graying is probably much more reversible than had been thought for a long time,” says study co-author Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Miami.Īround four years ago Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University, 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. 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. 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. This signaled a reversal in the normal graying process, which begins at the root. In one 1972 paper, the late dermatologist Stanley Comaish reported an encounter with a 38-year-old man who had what he described as a “ most unusual feature.” Although the vast majority of the individual’s hairs were either all black or all white, three strands were light near the ends but dark near the roots. Hints that gray hairs could spontaneously regain color have existed as isolated case studies within the scientific literature for decades. Although this may seem like a permanent change, new research reveals that the graying process can be undone-at least temporarily. As we grow older, black, brown, blonde or red strands lose their youthful hue. Few harbingers of old age are clearer than the sight of gray hair.
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