- Stress might cause hair to turn gray
Kapamilya celebrity Judy Ann Santos-Agoncillo showed that she was starting to have gray hair during the enhanced community quarantine.
On her Instagram account, she posted a photo of showing her grey hair with a caption: “Reality bites ngayong ECQ .. naglabasan na mga uban ko.. yung iba kakatubo pa lang, puti na agad??? Sorry guys… hindi kayo dumaan sa adolescent stage. 😂🙈🙈 labasan na lang ng mga uban! Sino sasali?? 😅”
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_wrxT2nBt0/
Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) has been implemented Luzon-wide to avoid the spread of the coronavirus. With the sudden change, many are experiencing stress, depression and anxiety which might cause gray hair.
A study funded by NIH’s National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) and other NIH components has been set to determine if stress could also cause hair to turn gray.
According to Dr. Ya-Chieh Hsu of Harvard University, they used mice to examine stress and hair graying. They exposed the mice to three types of stress involving mild, short-term pain, psychological stress,and restricted movement which all caused noticeable loss of melanocyte stem cell and hair graying.
“When we started to study this, I expected that stress was bad for the body — but the detrimental impact of stress that we discovered was beyond what I imagined,” Hsu says. “After just a few days, all of the melanocyte stem cells were lost. Once they’re gone, you can’t regenerate pigments anymore. The damage is permanent.”
But then the author highlighted that further study between the nervous system and stem cell in different tissues and organs is needed. The result gained in the research will be useful in the future investigation into the impact of stress on the body and other interventions.