How to Stop Premature Greying of Hair
When Ya-Chieh Hsu, professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, wanted to figure out exactly what makes hair turn grey, she started with an obvious, albeit anecdotal, culprit: stress. There are well-known historical examples of the connection between stress and hair greying Marie Antoinette’s coif reportedly blanched after she was captured during the French Revolution and studies have even linked stress in animals to greying hair.
In a study published in Nature, Hsu and her team report that the process starts with the sympathetic nervous system, which orchestrates all of the critical body processes that we never have to think about—our heart rate, our breathing, as well as things like digesting food and fighting off germs.
