Scientists have found evidence that stress can cause hair graying | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have found evidence that stress can cause hair graying

sciencedaily.com

35 pointsprostoalex18 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22173776

That's a pretty alarming finding to be honest. It's not just hair graying, it's also all kinds of other tissue damage that can occur, as the last few paragraphs hint at.

Stress may just kill us more directly than we've suspected, instead of through its physiological effects like e.g. elevated blood pressure and the effects from that.

Something interesting i found.

Magnesium attenuates the release of norepinephrine on the nerve cells (as mentioned in the article, its norepinephrine that causes the greying)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15477382

Its also known that during stressful situations, including extreme exercise, magnesium is depleted and excreted in urine.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507250/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17172008

What do you think, am i on to something?

This was long suspected. I've seen countless examples of this in real life. But it was never "proven" like this.

This was really interesting to me:

"But surprisingly, when we removed the adrenal gland from the mice so that they couldn't produce cortisol-like hormones, their hair still turned gray under stress."

It's also permanent.

And scientists still couldn't find a simple way to find man baldness :>

Epoxy

So it's related to norepinephrine. Wonder if SNRIs can give grey hair then.

it would be news if relaxation caused hair darkening

Hasn’t this been widely known for a long time?

Truth or knowledge is not how science works.

Science or not, it looks like millennia of real world human experience noticed this effect, even though it's hard to measure directly and is a slow process, sufficiently to end up in spoken language (some languages literally having the expression "I'm getting gray hair from this!" about a stressful experience)

It’s not necessarily a slow process. I know someone (actually know, not heard a story about) whose hair turned gray almost overnight after losing his son to a car accident.

It has been hypothesized, but not proven definitively, as in this paper.

I think it's been known by every grandmother and stressed out mom since we left the ocean as a species, but this is a case of "proving the tale" scientifically.

It does feel a bit moot though.

The first line of the article

> For a long time, anecdotes have connected stressful experiences with the phenomenon of hair graying. Now, for the first time, Harvard University scientists have discovered exactly how the process plays out: stress activates nerves that are part of the fight-or-flight response, which in turn cause permanent damage to pigment-regenerating stem cells in hair follicles.

Look at how a president’s hair turns over their term, it’s striking. Can’t think of a more stressful job.

This is generally understood as a natural consequence of aging rather than the rigors and demands of the job. Most presidents end their terms in their mid-fifties or mid-sixties [0], which is prime time for developing a head full of gray hair, whether you're the POTUS or not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...

It is valuable in science to test the things we think we already know, because there is a history of them sometimes being proved false. Plus, even if we were right, it is valuable to learn why the things we know are true.

(That said, it is possible to get overexcited about the cases where science disproves the things we think we know, because those are the things we hear about and it generates cognitively-available surprise and attention. But most of our implicit knowledge about the world is actually mostly accurate. Both "mosts" I used are required; a lot of our implicit knowledge is heuristic, and almost always has edge cases and domains where it will turn out false. But for the most part, it works or, you know, we'd die.)

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