Can stress cause gray hair?

This is a hotly debated topic that I have heard about for the entire 10+ years I have been writing and researching about hair related topics for men and women.

(Image of actor Richard Gere at 3-18-07 screening of The Hoax with gorgeous white and gray strands from DailyCeleb.com - all rights reserved).

While men suffer less social disapproval from graying temples than women (men with graying strands are even regarded as sexy), both males and females often wish to ditch those pesky grays.

Yes, there’s more of a social trend in 2008 (with both men and women) to love those grays and accept them proudly, but if you’re not one of those guys who love their gray, you need to know that stress may play a part in speeding up the snowy strands popping out in your hair.

An article in late 2007 by Coco Ballantyne in Scientific American examined the part that day to day stress plays in speeding up the graying machine in male genes.

The bottom line? Scientists say that stress may indeed play a role in the graying process. Those scientists are gathering clues indicating while gray hair is most likely genetically predetermined, that stress and lifestyle may speed up or slow down the appearance of gray by a plus or minus of five to 10 years.

Can a period of intense stress cause your hair to turn gray overnight? Unlikely. According to experts, gray or white strands evolve from a “gradual depletion of (melanocyte) stem cells that eventually lead to the loss of pigment. Not from an overnight shock.

There are other suspicions and hypotheses that exist regarding the idea that graying hair could actually be the result of free radical damage that may damage the melanin production of hair color resulting in the arrival of gray or white strands.

However, as reported by Scientific American, practice physicians have observed accelerated graying among patients under stress, says Tyler Cymet, head of family medicine at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. Cymet conducted a small retrospective study on hair graying among patients at Sinai. “We’ve seen that people who are stressed two to three years report that they turn gray sooner,” he says.

What does this all mean? It means that you might have a chance to slow down the arrival of those genetically predetermined gray strands by living a healthy lifestyle, taking a good vitamin supplement that fights free radicals and nourishes the hair root and taking time out to relax and enjoy life.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under Men's Hairstyles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.