Why Some Gray Hairs May Regain Pigment

Hi, Rhonda. I would love to hear your thoughts or research on graying hair. And more specifically, is there anything that can be done, lifestyle, nutrition, supplements, that can slow this process down? First and foremost, unfortunately, graying hair is largely, largely, largely genetically determined. So keep that in mind. Like, you could be extremely healthy, have a great lifestyle, getting all your micronutrients, low stress, that is all gonna help. But if you've got those early graying genes, if your parents grayed really early in life, it's very likely that you're fighting genetics there on that. So keep that in mind. So the loss of hair pigmentation is a hallmark of aging. It typically begins actually during a person's 20s.

The timing and extent of graying vary again according to genetics and the interaction between biological factors. Psychological factors is a really big one. And graying hair is generally considered irreversible, but there have been some recent data that have come out that demonstrate that might not be so true, that graying is not necessarily a linear process. And that some graying hair may be reversible depending again on what's driving the graying. So if we're talking about genetic factors, it's going to be largely irreversible. But if we're talking about external factors like stress, it may actually be reversible. So one of the primary drivers of graying hair is oxidative stress. In the hair follicle, which damages the pigment-producing region, the melanocyte, of the hair shaft.

So oxidative stress, we've talked about this a million times, it occurs when our mitochondria inside of our cells are making energy. You know, it's an internal— it happens, there's like an internal thing that's happening, and there's psychological factors, biological factors that can affect it as well. So there's evidence that depigmented hair has mitochondrial energy metabolic dysfunction. So it's really interesting because there's a lot of case reports and anecdotal reports that suggest that repigmentation can occur and it can cause kind of like a bicolor hair. In other words, like the repigmentation sometimes is a different color than what the person's original hair color was, which is fascinating.

So there's one, um, study, I don't know, it was about a year ago or so, that we, we actually put out in our Science Digest where, where the authors of the study collected dark, depigmented, and also bicolor hairs from about 14 young adults. Their average age was about 35. They didn't color their hair, they didn't bleach their hair, there's no chemically treated hair, nothing. And they were just natural. And, um, there, there, you know, some of these participants, participants also completed a lot of stress assessment questionnaires on a life event calendar. And, um, the, the, the authors of this, the researchers, were able to overlay the hair pigmentation patterns with life events in these, these participants.

So they found that a depigmentation and repigmentation event corresponded with moments in their— in the participants' lives linked to a stressful event. So there was like marital discord, for example. So, um, that, that was linked to when hair pigment was depigmented, hair depigmented, so it became gray. And then the repigmentation was linked— again, this is, um, the repigmentation was, again, uh, they were able to identify it because it was a different color of, um, there was a different color of hair versus what their natural color was, and that was linked to a non-stressful event. Typically it was when the person had gone on a vacation.

So the authors concluded that there was these depigmented hairs, um, there was a depigmentation and repigmentation that was really linked to psychological stress. And they also measured and looked at the depigmented hairs, and they found mitochondrial dysfunction in this, you know, the melanocytes, these cells that are producing pigmentation, suggesting that mitochondrial metabolism is involved in the graying process as well. And, you know, I would say, so you might go here and think, well, then maybe we need to, you know, do everything to improve our mitochondrial health and that, you know, that's something that we should focus on for Preventing gray hair, and I would say like that's absolutely true. And one of the best things you can do is exercise.

Exercise is one of the best things for your mitochondria. It doesn't have to be the zone two training. High-intensity interval training is very good for mitochondria. It grows new, healthy, young mitochondria. So whether you're doing more low- to moderate-intensity exercise or you're doing high-intensity interval training or vigorous exercise, all of it is really good for mitochondria and improving your mitochondrial health. With respect to supplements, alpha-lipoic acid, ubiquinol, these are both antioxidants. There's the MitoPure, which is thought to be the— it's the urolithin A that's found in pomegranate that can clear away damaged mitochondria. Resveratrol has been shown to improve mitochondria.

There's a lot of different— supplements that have been shown to improve mitochondrial function. All of them, I would say, they're, like, not even comparable to what exercise can do. So that's the thing to focus on. But it is, you know, interesting to think that maybe some of these supplements could affect mitochondrial health. You know, certainly ubiquinol has been shown to, particularly in the context of statins, So, you know, not a lot of research looking at graying hair, but I think, you know, you could draw some parallels and say, well, maybe there's, you know, a possibility that anything that's going to improve my mitochondria will also, you know, help with slowing the graying of hair.

And certainly going on, you know, vacations and trying to lower and buffer your stress, meditation, yoga, things that can buffer out the psychological stress are really important as well. There's also been some evidence that certain vitamins, particularly B vitamins, can affect premature graying of hair. So this is when you're really— a person has graying hair in their 20s, it's happening really early. That's been linked to vitamin B12 deficiency, folic acid, B7 deficiency as well. So those things have also been shown to reverse graying hair, but again, it's really— sort of, I would say, isolated to this population of people that have severe vitamin deficiency, B12, B7, folic acid deficiency, and they have really, really early prematurely graying hair.

Other than that, it's not like someone that has normal B vitamin levels of their B vitamins is going to reverse their graying hair by taking a B complex. Like, that's not going to happen. Okay, and something I did want to mention, there's no direct evidence on photobiomodulation. So this is red light laser therapy or red light therapy, doesn't necessarily have to be laser, it could be LED, on hair graying. There's no evidence on it. There is evidence looking at, first of all, vitiligo. So vitiligo is, you know, where you have depigmentation in melanocytes and skin cells. So there's a study involving 30 people that had sort of segmental type vitiligo. So it's either on their head or their neck.

And photobiomodulation was able to repigment, improve their repigmentation in about 60% of these people with successive treatments. And so, so the reason I thought it was interesting was because photobiomodulation has been shown to affect also regrowing of the hair. And, um, on— we have a photobiomodulation topic page that we're about to be posting. And so that's going to go live and you guys will have all this information But the parameters are really important for regrowing the hair. So the wavelength for regrowing hair was 655 nanometers, and the irradiance was a combination of either LED or laser, or and laser. And so it was about 22 milliwatts per square centimeter for the LED and 4.6 milliwatts per square centimeter for the laser.

And there's some commercially available devices that may at least have some of those parameters. So the HairMax LaserComb and the Lexington International. And I think I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna get one of these devices. I'm not sure if I'm gonna do which one I'm gonna do out of the two of those yet, but I am gonna get one for my husband to try out.