Premature Graying of Hair: Review with Updates
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
/soapbox
Get your B12 tested (before taking supplements!).
B12 deficiency is known to present in many ways, and also to be often overlooked in clinical settings[1]. It’s known that not everyone presents with the anaemia from it[2], which is often why it’s skipped as a diagnostic option. Additionally, long-term/severe deficiency can present with symptoms almost identical to multiple sclerosis[3]. Deficiency of other B vitamins, such as B2, can cause a functional B12 deficiency as well[4]. It’s also known that supplementation will falsely elevate levels even in the presence of a deficiency.
/unsoapbox
[1] https://www.mcpiqojournal.org/article/S2542-4548(19)30033-5/...
[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2022-071725
[3] https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
[4] https://www.iomcworld.org/articles/paradoxical-vitamin-b12-d...
It sounds to me that what you’re saying is that a daily multivitamin would not help in this case.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_intestinal_bacterial_ove...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metformin CTRL-F "B12"
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/114/22/1989/111148...
So a multivitamin might contain some magnesium, but what it doesn’t tell you on the label is that the form of magnesium they give you is not going to be absorbed at all and just pass right through your body. Most people need some other formulation of magnesium to actually be absorbed. I would go so far as to say that a fair amount of what goes into a lot of multivitamins on the label is borderline fraud because of stuff like this
Regular blood tests and dosing is expensive in mental effort, time, and money.
As for minerals, it is possible to manage the dose without a need for testing.
In contrast, the inactive cheaper form of B6 which is pyridoxine is more likely to result in problems if taken at above 30 mg/day in the long term.
Again, thank you.
Going through your posts I see quite a few terms to google and learn about. I appreciate your advice, and for kickstarting a health improvement in my life that I've been meaning to do for years.
There is a more insidious form of it whereby the active form doesn't enter the brain. Symptoms are: difficulty speaking, tremors and ataxia. This can be tested by CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) testing. This assumes that the active form is supplemented and it is present in blood. It can be remedied by a course of corticosteroid pills, followed by megadosing B12 orally daily. Refer to PMID 38924428.
I take a triple active form of it which is methyl+hydroxy+adenosyl, covering all bases, but a total of just 500 mcg per day, above which it harms my sleep.
Yup, not everyone can convert cyanocobalamin or hydroxocobalamin to adenosyl-/methylcobalamin. Especially in severe cases, anecdotally I’ve seen people not make progress with the standard cyanocobalamin injections, but then make huge progress with methylcobalamin injections. Unfortunately, methylcobalamin is often not preferred in injectable form due to very quick degradation into hydroxocobalamin upon exposure to light.
Also, get a Methylmalonic Acid Test with you B12 levels. An MMA test is more useful because it is an enz=yme which uses B12, so when the active form of B12 is low, so will MMA in most cases.
It does not. The cobalamin molecules are quite large and don’t penetrate the sublingual mucosa very well. On top of that, the proteins in saliva that bind to B12s will cause any bound B12 to not absorb sublingually, instead having to wait to make it through the digestive system for intestinal uptake.
Sublingual is still certainly a better option than oral pills, but the injections are preferable in severe cases for a reason.
Absolute nonsense.
Did you even bother to look for one paper on the subject? Here are a few:
https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?pid=S0034-8376202000060...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34871525/
https://www.proquest.com/openview/e9a25963dbc92150e420a3a847...
If I stop taking the supplements for a few weeks, the memory problems come back. If I start again, a week later my memory is excellent. It’s well worth the minor effort.
Also, don't forget the other B vitamins. In truth I take them all.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Osama-Arafat/publicatio...
> METHYLCOBALAMIN HAS AN EFFECT ON HYPOTHALAMIC–HYPOPHYSEAL– ADRENAL AXIS
In rats, but may apply to humans too.
Also, B12 is water soluble, which generally means that your body is pretty good at flushing out any excess it can't use, making it difficult to overdose on. (Compared to fat-soluble substances.)
Even at just one milligram per day, it can significantly harm sleep.
It has a high circulating half life of six days, which implies that it can really build up if repeatedly megadosed in this period.
Use it with a 2-way or 3-way pill splitter, just once piece per day.
For acid, use famotidine to the extent possible, in as low a dose as does the job. For overnight suppression, however, omeprazole is useful.
I guess if it will keep my hair color longer that’s a nice side effect!
B9 and B12 are interdependent. When the body uptakes cobalamins, the ligands are pulled off and replaced with ligands sourced from other processes. IIRC in the case of methylcobalamin, the methyl group is pulled off and replaced with a methyl group that’s moved over from methylfolate via a riboflavin-dependent reaction. Been a hot minute since I looked into this so I may have some details incorrect.
I have also been taking B5 as both calcium pantothenate at 500 mg/day and also as pantethine at 300 mg/day for years, neither of which has done anything either in this context.
Similarly, B12 hasn't visibly helped either.
I suspect that copper is the issue with me.
The lowest dose of MitoQ, a 5 mg capsule per day, had lowered my blood pressure significantly after a month of use, well below normal, approaching an unsafe low. Moreover, it took another month after discontinuation of MitoQ for the blood pressure to normalize. I shudder to think how much more powerful SkQ1 would be if taken orally. My first impression is that SkQ1 seems more relevant for local use than for systemic use.
In fact, hair colors contain toxic harmful chemicals that even increase the risk of certain cancers. I do color my hair, but I don't like it, and I do it as little as necessary.
Because in terms of driving highways are safer (have less accidents) than urban and rural roads, and the most dangerous areas are intersections.
Or if you're a male, why bother with coloring at all? Just own the young silver fox look and rock with it. Or shave it and grow a huge beard. As a male you have a lot of natural workarounds against imperfect hair color..
Prolonged copper deficiency can cause irreversible neuropathies and CNS damage. You should try to get tested for it if you can.
Hopefully some day we can have an over the counter drug that restores or slows graying. I don't have issues with mine beyond it being patchy, distracting.
Not exactly confidence inspiring when the very first word is a typo.
10 years ago, the research consensus behind hair graying was, "we don't know what causes it, lol." Today, it's a little bit better understood -- though far from completely understood.
There's a handy review article here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10535703/
To summarize, there's no known agent that can reliably repigment gray hair. Sometimes powerful drugs repigment hair as a side-effect.
Hair graying results from the dysfunction or loss of melanogenic melanocytes and the depletion or immobility of McSCs, often due to aging or stress.
Lots of cellular signalling pathways are involved. The Wnt/β-Catenin pathway promotes melanocyte stem cell (McSC) proliferation and differentiation, while the MC1R/cAMP pathway, activated by α-MSH, drives melanin production via the MITF transcription factor. The SCF/c-KIT pathway supports melanocyte survival and function, and the Endothelin/EDNRB pathway stimulates both melanocyte proliferation and melanogenesis. In contrast, the PI3K/AKT pathway inhibits melanogenesis by suppressing MITF activity, and the TGF-β pathway maintains McSC quiescence while inhibiting melanogenesis.
Stress is actually a factor because activation of the sympathetic nervous system can deplete McSCs, and neuropeptides like CGRP, SP, and VIP, can either enhance or suppress melanogenesis in ways which are, as yet, unclear. Dermal white adipose tissue (dWAT) near hair follicles also plays a role by secreting factors such as adiponectin that affect hair growth and pigmentation.
A drug to reverse or prevent hair graying would be very welcome, so I hope that the phenomenon becomes better understood in the near future, and then we get products that work.
So is mine, and now I've lost most of the hair on my head I shave it so completely bald.
But I've learnt to accept it. I don't like it, and wish it was different. There's nothing I can do and I have plenty of more pressing problems to worry about.
So I keep fit and eat reasonably healthily. So even though I look old, I don't have to act it
Yet, Everytime I look in the mirror I also don't like it and wish it were different.
Have I really accepted it?
There's some research in B-vitamins and PABA for hair repigmentation, reviewed (among other things) here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6995950/
But the B-vitamin in question is calcium pantothenate (B5), and that B5/PABA research is very old -- from the 1940s and 1950s. The results were also hardly anything to write home about; a very mild effect at best.
I don't think that there is a reliable chemical agent to reverse hair graying at the moment, but it seems as though it's become possible in theory to target those mechanisms which appear to be responsible...
And yes I have graying hair at mid-late 20s. Sometimes I'm astonished how people don't complain about their stress levels. I feel weak, child-like, immature, and feeble being unable to tolerate maybe 10% of what my wife can.
B6 as P5P at 20 mg twice daily has helped my stress. Similarly, magnesium citrate has too. Theanine is also relevant at night.
I think the best cure for stress for someone who has saved up money is to quit their day job.
The most significant danger seems to be you get a low performance review. As a faang engineer that's a pretty weak a significant danger as there are many other jobs that will simply assume you're good.
Not just lack of control, but lack of a light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of people can tolerate high stress for a while provided they know there's a payoff at the end, an assurance that things are gonna get better.
But when that payoff is taken away or non existent (no money, dead end job, shit living conditions, no chance of home ownership, no having a family, friends group, etc) people can start to fall apart even with low amounts of stress.
But now that I have seen my actual genetics, I get it. I am different and there is no adapting for me. My environment needs to look much different or I will die early like my brother and mother. I could work if the job was flexible enough but that is impossible.
Capitalism needs us to be all the same because that is easier to manage. Now that they weeded people like me out they are ramping up the stress and weeding out the more stable people with this BS gig work and hustle meme. You are being crushed for someone elses profit.
P.S. Full head and beard of grey hair at 58 and I love it, would not change it. My grandfather was grey at 50 and lived till he was 98 so who cares.
Anyway, I always make this comment anywhere I can because migraines are horrible, vitamins are cheap and maybe it will help someone else (obviously anecdotal; sample size of 1; I can't find any supporting research etc).
Also N=1, but I remember coming across some research that confirmed this when I was taking the supplements.
Conclusions: A pooled analysis of available randomized controlled clinical trials demonstrated that Vitamin B2 400 mg/day for three months supplementation had significant effect on days, duration, frequency, and pain score of migraine attacks.
For some months I've been taking 200 mg/day and it reduced the frequency of my migraine attacks in half.
One of my oldest friends is a lady who went gray in her 20's. I only found out in her late 30's when she went through some mental health issues and missed aggressively dying to hide the roots.
My graying started when I was 15 and first appeared as a single silver strand at the center of my hairline. At 28, I now have a cluster of them in that center spot, as well as diffusely all over my head, including the occiput. I think my temples and sideburns were actually relatively spared.
Also of interest to me: once in a blue moon, I shed a hair that appears to be reverting from gray back to pigmented -- it's gray close to the tip and black closer to the root. I wonder what factors might cause this reversal.
(I also have one white hair that grows inside my nose...)
Very likely: Stress. Also diet and exercise. They are interrelated. But for people that I’ve known have hair go gray and back again, it was stress.
https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/9390-study-explains-o....
Thus not surprisingly “Covid and gray hair” brings some results too, including reversing of Covid associated gray hair.
Receipts:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5040049/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00088...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12902-023-01348-9
https://etj.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/etj/12/6/ETJ-23...
https://www.amazon.com/American-Crew-Precision-Blend-Hair/dp...
It’s a temporary hair color, which tends not to damage your hair. I find it lasts about a month.
The possibility of it being some sort of vitamin deficiency that this raises has me feeling like I should at least get my levels tested. I can't imagine that it is a B12 deficiency however due to how much canned fish I consume. It's become my go to easy lunch since the beginning of COVID.
Full grey here. The amount of comments and compliments I get about my hair is unreal. I never really got any before greying.
I say embrace it.
In me, canned tuna caused major problems that required antibiotics to resolve after conducting thousands of dollars of tests. The tuna evidently had certain highly inflammatory bacteria. I consider myself lucky that the antibiotic worked at all.