By Sarah Klein
It’s natural to assume that stress contributes to grey hair. But if you dig into the research, you’ll find that few studies on the topic exist. And while some have found associations between premature greying and stress, no research has proved the link.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know,” says Dr Paradi Mirmirani, a dermatologist at Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Centre in Northern California.
The science of stress and grey hair
In past studies, researchers have asked participants to fill out questionnaires about their hair colour and stress levels, and then scientists would see if they could link them.
In one study published in 2016, for instance, scientists surveyed more than 1100 young Turkish adults and found that the 315 who reported prematurely greying hair had higher stress levels than those who didn’t. (Those with premature greying also had histories of alcohol use and chronic disease, and they had parents who went grey at a young age.)
There are ethical challenges when testing the consequences of stress on humans.Credit: Getty Images
But a mouse study published in 2020 took the research a step forward. In it, researchers stressed mice in various ways, including by injecting them with a chili-pepper-like chemical that induced a “fight-or-flight” response. This caused them to release the stress hormone norepinephrine, which, in turn, depleted their hair follicles of the stem cells involved with adding pigment to mouse fur. The hair then grew in gray.
Researchers demonstrated similar effects of high levels of norepinephrine on human stem cells in a lab as well, supporting the idea that the stress hormone is linked with greying in humans, says Ya-Chieh Hsu, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, and one of the authors of this research.
But studies on this topic are challenging to perform on people because researchers can’t ethically induce artificially high stress responses in humans like they can in animals or cells, Hsu says.
One small human study published in 2021 still advanced the narrative: researchers plucked various strands of hair from 14 volunteers who had at least some greying. Several of the strands were fully grey, some were partially grey, and some hadn’t greyed at all. The scientists then created high-resolution digital images of the hairs and calculated when each strand went grey using estimates of how quickly hair grows.
They also asked the participants to plot out stressful experiences from the past year on a timeline and rank them from least to most distressing. The researchers found that when a strand turned grey frequently corresponded with the most stressful moment of that volunteer’s previous year.
This was the first time a study linked specific stressful events with the exact moment hair began to grey, says Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University and an author of the study.
If one of your parents have grey hair, chances are that you might end up with it too.Credit: iStock
It offered “our first real evidence that maybe stress does, in fact, play a role for some people,” says Dr Victoria Barbosa, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Chicago.
If such preliminary research continues to identify stress-related changes that cause hair greying, it may one day lead to treatments that can repigment hair, Mirmirani says. But we still need more and larger human studies to confirm the links, Barbosa says.
Future research might also help explain why stress is linked with hair greying in some people but not in others, says Dr Sindhuja Sominidi Damodaran, a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
It’s also too soon to know if easing stress could slow or reverse premature greying.
Other causes of grey hair
For most people, genetics is the main driver of hair greying, Barbosa says. If you have a parent who went grey at a young age, you’re likely to as well.
Certain medical conditions can cause hair to lose pigment prematurely, Barbosa says. Those include vitiligo, which causes patches of skin to lose colour, and alopecia areata, a type of hair loss. An over- or underactive thyroid and chemotherapy treatments can also contribute to premature greying, Damodaran says. Deficiencies in iron, calcium and vitamins B12 and D are correlated with going grey early too, she says, as are obesity and smoking.
Barbosa says she likes to use greying as an opportunity to talk with her patients about accepting greying as a natural part of ageing.
This can be especially liberating for women, she says, since “greying has always been socially more acceptable for men”.
The New York Times
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