In recent years, many people have started to pay attention to the changes of their hair color. Lots of parents are worried about their children as many teenagers have started to grow white or gray hair. Many people hold the view that high stress is responsible to this transformation of hair color from normal black, red, brown or gold to white or gray. Some even claim that Barack Obama, the President of the USA, is a evidence of this opinion as his hair color has turned from fine black to gray obviously in a few years after being elected. However, is stress the key factor that can affect people’s hair color?
Credit:(JASON REED AND JONATHAN ERNST)
To fully understand how stress may affect people hair color, we have to learn some basic knowledge about our hair. We can imagine our scalp as a factory and our hair is the product. The hair follicles on the scalp are workers that are producing hair along with melanin cells. Healthy melanin cells can protect people from oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is known as an imbalanced status of oxidation and antioxidation in human’s body. It is also regarded as an important cause of aging and diseases. When people reach around 30 years old, the hair factory will start to waste. Oxide like hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) will start to accumulate in scalps. This change in our body will weaken and kill melanin cells. The hair factory will start to produce white hair because of the shortage of melanin cells. Therefore, the primary cause of the change of hair color is oxidative stress.
Can mental stress cause oxidative stress to affect people’s hair color? In fact, researchers lack the experimental evidence to answer this question as ethicists will not allow scientists to artificially let subjects feel high pressure in a long period for the researching purpose. However, many scientists have been studying the problem of hair loss and change in hair color. They claim that hair color can be influenced by several factors, such as endocrine dyscrasia, psychological trauma, tension and disturbance of blood circulation. Also, earlier in 2016, a England research group found a kind of gene (IRF4) that is related to the change in hair color. Moreover, scientists also remind people that some external factors, including smoking, air pollution and bad dietary habit can also increase the chance that hair color turns to white.
