Balding & Greying May Soon Be A Thing Of The Past. Get Your … – Instinct Magazine

I had my 25th class reunion this past weekend. Flying all the way back to Maine, having flights delayed then cancelled (thanks American Airlines), and then needing to rent a car to drive 9 hours from Philadelphia to Bangor gave me more grey hairs than I already had. But going to my 25th class reunion, I was already grey and balding. So what?

Months before I was to attend, I was trying a new product out to "lessen the amount of grey" that I was sporting up there. I didn't tell any of my friends or my barber. It was a gradual fade that my roommates and even my workwife did not notice I was doing, but they could tell something was different. It was so good that they were recommending it to their loved ones over the products they were already using.

Was I cheating? Was I going to be lying to my classmates? Would I lose some of my daddy bear status? I was going to continue anyway.

Soon, we all may have a way to be less grey and even fill in some spots.

Dallas doctor finds the root of balding and graying hair and is working on treatment

When the mice went gray and bald, the doctor knew he was onto something.

For more than 10 years, Dr. Lu Le had studied cells and genes, hoping to understand the roots of cancer and further the search for a cure.

Instead, in his lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he discovered something unexpected a chemical and biological process that could explain gray hair and bald heads in people.

Science often works this way. A search in one direction leads to an entirely different discovery in another. For Le, baldness and graying werent concerns of his research. And yet, there they were, gray and bald mice inside his lab. - dallasnews.com

Accidental discovery

Accidents are a good thing, no? While focusing on how cancer begins, Le and his discovered the role a protein called KROX20 plays not just in nerve development but in hair color and growth.

The KROX20 protein turns on in skin cells that develop into shafts of hair. These cells then produce a protein called stem cell factor (SCF) that is essential for hair color. When that SCF protein was deleted from mice in KROX20 cells, their hair turned gray and then white. And when the scientists deleted the KROX20 cells, the mice turned bald.

"The mice turned gray and then completely white. That was unexpected," Le said. - dallasnews.com

Whether baldness and loss of hair color is reversible is a long way from being answered.

If doctors could prevent greyness and balding, would you do it?

Would you entertain the idea of growing back your hair or getting rid of the grey?

I stopped coloring my hair a month before the reunion, had all the fake color cut out and didn't think twice about it.

h/t: dallasnews.com

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Balding & Greying May Soon Be A Thing Of The Past. Get Your ... - Instinct Magazine