This is a YouTube video titled "Why do we get grey hair as we age? With Dr Sophia Kogan" containing an expert talk from April 28, 2021, where Dr. Sophia Kogan explains the biological and molecular reasons behind hair graying, including aging, oxidative stress, and the impact of stress on melanocyte stem cells.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. Tell me about gray. Why do we get gray so? I mean, there's so many different reasons. There's the aging process, right? We have mitochondrial decline in aging, and so you have less ability to convert reactive oxygen species. There's buildup of hydrogen peroxide, and all of those things are going to contribute. Also with age, you have upregulation of oxidative stress and inflammatory genes in the follicle. So there's a lot of things that are going on with age, but also stress, right? You have. There's a paper that came out in 2020, actually, which was a really interesting paper, and it said that. Do you ever hear of the Marie Antoinette syndrome? I don't think so. I mean, I know about the off with their head kind of thing. Exactly. So she went gray right before that. And so that's the story. I don't know if it's true or not or whatever, but the truth. So. But we know stories like that when somebody got really stressed and went gray overnight. How does that. So the neuroendocrine system actually sends a signal down, and what happens is that the melanocyte stem cells are mobilized and they mature all of a sudden, very quickly, and all of them matured, and so the reserve is gone over time. So as we're stressed, that's actually. The study kind of proved that and said that, okay, that's what happens. And they saw on a molecular level that there's some maturation of the stem cells into mature melanocytes, and then, boom, you got nothing left.
