Cancer Study Yields Clues About Gray Hair
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004
Kathy Bates With Gray Hair
Cancer Study Yields Clues About Gray Hair
WASHINGTON (AP) — Those annoying gray hairs that increasingly leer back from the bathroom mirror may have some value after all. Cancer researchers have developed a new explanation for graying hair that they hope will also shed light on the most dangerous type of skin cancer.
“Preventing the graying of hair is not our goal,” said senior researcher Dr. David E. Fisher of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
“What we really want is to come up with treatments for melanoma,” Fisher said in a telephone interview. Melanoma is the malignant form of melanocytes, the cells that help color hair and skin, and it is particularly resistant to chemotherapy and radiation.
Fisher’s team found that hair goes gray when melanocytes become depleted.
The scalp contains a reservoir of adult stem cells that provide a continuous supply of these color-making cells, they found. But as the body ages these cells become depleted and sometimes begin to develop in the wrong part of the hair follicle.
The research, published online Thursday by the Journal Science, originally focused on mice. But the team also studied human scalp tissue at various ages and found a similar pattern of cell depletion. Continue reading “Cancer Study Yields Clues About Gray Hair” »
