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When people get stressed, they often suffer hair loss. This condition, known as telogen effluvium, results from hair follicles going dormant. But the molecular cause of this switch is unknown.
To solve that mystery, Harvard University stem cell biologist Ya-Chieh Hsu and her colleagues turned to mice. They first confirmed the effects of stress by subjecting mice to unpredictable discomforts such as tilting their cages or flashing the room lights, and indeed saw that the animals grew less hair than unstressed animals did. The researchers then conducted a series of experiments to dig deeper into the physiological consequences of stress and found long-range signaling from the endocrine glands above the kidneys to cells in the skin. The group published its results March 31 in Nature.
“This is the first paper that identifies the [mechanistic] link between stress hormones and the hair growth,” says Rui Yi, a ...
