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How the stress of fight or flight turns hair white

Signalling from the sympathetic nervous system of mice when subjected to stress leads to the depletion of a stem-cell population in their hair follicles. This discovery sheds light on why stress turns hair prematurely grey.
  1. Shayla A. Clark

    1. Shayla A. Clark is in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903, USA.

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  2. Christopher D. Deppmann

    1. Christopher D. Deppmann is in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903, USA, and in the Departments of Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology and Neuroscience, University of Virginia.

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It has been said that Marie Antoinette’s hair went completely white on the night before her beheading. This story might be apocryphal, but rapid greying of the hair is now widely referred to as Marie Antoinette syndrome. It is often assumed to be caused by stress — a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified by photographs of heads of state before and after they held office. However, the relative contributions of ageing, genetic factors and stress to greying are not known — in part owing to a lack of mechanistic understanding of the process. Writing in Nature, Zhang et al.1 identify the mechanism governing premature greying in mice that have experienced stress.

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Nature 577, 623-624 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03949-8

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