What causes gray hair?
What causes gray hair? Is it stress, is it teenagers, or is it wisdom that comes from experience? Let’s find out.
Once you turn 30 years old, your chances of going gray increases by 10-20 percent every decade thereafter.
[pullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”#228B22″ class=”” size=”17″]“It’s a fact of life that, eventually, virtually everyone will go gray,” says Dr. Mercola, a leading health expert and physician.[/pullquote]
Hair color comes from a pigment called melanin. Every hair stand contains dark melanin (eumelanin) and light melanin (pheomelanin), which combine to create many different colors.
During your younger years, special stem cells inject pigment into cells that contain keratin.
Keratin is a protein that makes up you hair and gives it color. As you get older, you have less melanin and therefore less color, and eventually gray and white hair.
The actual cause of the reduced melanin as you age was unknown, until now. New research truly shows what causes gray hair.
The international study involved a genome-wide association scan in over 6,000 Latin Americans to look for genes related to hair, including graying, balding, and more.
The researchers found that the gene that is linked to blonde hair in Europeans is also associated with gray hair. The gene accounted for gray hair in about 30 percent of study participants.
The other 70 percent of the factors include environmental factors, stress, smoking, oxidative stress and more.
“The researchers plan to look for ways to manipulate this genetic pathway to prevent hair from turning gray (including drugs, which I would not recommend taking for the purpose of changing your hair color),” Mercola explains.
The study showing what causes gray hair was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Note: None of the information in our website is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any illness or disease. The content on our website is for educational purposes only.
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REFERENCES:
1. “What Really Causes Gray Hair?” Mercola.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
2. “A Genome-wide Association Scan in Admixed Latin Americans Identifies Loci Influencing Facial and Scalp Hair Features.” Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group, n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
3. “Why Does Hair Turn Gray?” Library of Congress. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
