Stress slows hair growth, and scientists have determined why

There is the old adage that worry and stress make you want to “pull your hair out”. (Of course, there’s also the OCD spectrum hair pulling disorder called trichotillomania, which is often triggered by stress.) Now scientists have identified a stress hormone that appears to inhibit hair growth. In studies on mice, they determined that the stress protein, corticosterone, inhibits a protein called specific growth arrest 6 (GAS6) which is responsible for activating the process of hair growth. Of nature:

[Harvard biologist Sekyu] Choi and his colleagues first tested the role of the adrenal glands – which produce stress hormones and are a key endocrine organ – in regulating hair growth, by surgically removing it from mice. The telogen phases were much shorter in the hair follicles of these animals (which the team nicknamed the ADX mice) than in the control mice (less than 20 days versus 60 to 100 days), and the follicles engaged in the hair growth about three times as often. The authors were able to suppress this frequent hair growth and restore the normal hair cycle by feeding ADX mice corticosterone (a stress hormone normally produced by the adrenal glands of animals). Interestingly, when they unpredictably applied various mild stressors to normal mice for nine weeks, they observed high levels of corticosterone accompanied by reduced hair growth, supporting the idea that the corticosterone produced by the adrenal glands during chronic stress inhibits the initiation of hair growth.[…]

Administration of GAS6 into the skin using an adenovirus vector (a common tool in gene therapy) not only stimulated hair growth in normal mice, but also restored hair growth during chronic stress. or a corticosterone diet[…]

Modern human life is inevitably stressful. But maybe one day it will be possible to combat the negative impact of chronic stress on our hair, at least – by adding GAS6.