Stress turns hair gray by triggering the body’s fight-or-flight response
Fur of stressed mice goes prematurely white when the number of pigment-producing cells plummets
A new study finds that stress turns hair gray when nerves in the sympathetic nervous system (pink) activate and deplete a hair follicle’s melanocyte stem cells (yellow), which give hair its color. Teal marks the cells’ nuclei.
Bing Zhang and Ya-Chieh Hsu