Are Scientists any Closer to Uncovering why we get Gray Hair?
Didn’t it use to be when you were young that no one ever got gray hair up until they turned 40? By the time the first few strands of silver appeared, people felt they had been given a fair chance – that they’d had a good run. These days though, you get gray in your 20s. You could pull it off like you were George Clooney. But barring that though, what are you choices?
Whatever drug company finds some kind remedy for this is on to the big time. While that’s still some way off, researchers have unlocked the first secrets of why hair turns gray in the first place. Hair follicles contain stem cells. There are different kinds to grow hair and to color hair. Melanocytes, the stem cells that produce the color, need to have their coloring action coordinated with the hair growing. There is a signaling protein that does this that gets all mixed up at its job. In short, you have what it takes to get beautifully colored hair. It’s just that the cells that color your hair haven’t been turned on in a while. Researchers are hard at work understanding the molecular pathways that turn the protein-signaling system on. Scientists have just made an important step forward in this. Vitiligo, a disease that gives people unsightly patches of unpigmented skin, occurs because the body’s natural mechanism for flushing out the skin’s supply of hydrogen peroxide gets to be defective. It occurs to scientists that the same thing could be happening to our hair. If you can wait a couple of years, they’ll probably have a cure for this.
Women usually get to keep their hair color for five years longer than men. African men usually begin to get their first gray strands in their mid-40s. White men tend to go gray about 10 years earlier than that.
As far as researchers are concerned, studying gray hair and finding a cure for it isn’t just about helping people with their vanity and cashing in on what is likely to be a multibillion-dollar business giving people their hair color back. It is likely to help them understanding the aging process at a very deep level. They feel that if they can learn how the body succeeds in shutting down pigment-producing cells, they can use the same technique to shut down skin cancer cells.
Right now, one thing that really baffles scientists is why it is that if gray hair has something to do with the accelerated aging of the hair follicles, people with premature gray hair shouldn’t die any sooner.