Dr. David Sinclair on Gray Hair Reversal

and that is it stops growing on your head it starts growing other places you get in your nose your eyebrow hair start to get long you get in your ears what's going on here we don't really know why hair starts growing in the wrong places as annoying as it is probably I think what's happening is that we have this evolutionary program where we used to be a lot hairier 6 to 10 million years ago and those stem cells are still ready to grow thick hair in our ears on our nose wherever it you don't want

it to grow and that the changes in the structure of the of the DNA the what we call the epig genome is changing over time and that those regions that are normally silent in the ears so you don't get big hairy ears are unraveling as part of the aging process so these are parts of ancient genetic code that have been uh that have been allowed to escape from the from the histones and now they're readable by the cells right and we become our ancestors unfortunately so shave or pluck that out for now but that what

that means is we would predict that if we can slow down aging using the methods that we've talked about in this and other episodes we should also prevent that process from happening or at least delay it till much later in life would that be the case with graying hair too uh it could be because graying is part of not just a genetic program but can be accelerated by things that are also known to accelerate aging itself such as psychological stress and we this is really interesting because we know from some fairly recent research that plays

a key I mean it's always been sort of not oh you're going to make me go gray right my grandmother you're going to make me go gray and be like Grandma you're already gray but um we've long known that gray hair is associated with stress um what's coming out now is that it doesn't have to be permanent it's been known for probably centuries that you can have these binary colored hairs where they at the tip of the hair it's dark and then it's gray in the middle and then dark again at the bottom and people

have wondered what the heck is going on and just recently in 2021 a group of researchers had to look at what was happening in people's lives during that gray hair growth period and they found that there were remarkably stressful periods of those people lives where where they they didn't stop working they didn't they didn't sleep they didn't go on a vacation and so I think it's very clear that stress can induce gray hair a loss of color from the hair but what's also remarkable about about that finding is that it proves that gray hair is

reversible which means that what we're talking about here is is an epigenetic effect sure I mean anything that is genetic is is essentially irreversible so this is an an epigenetic effect what I would imagine is that after you've been gray for many many years it's going to be very difficult to reverse that but in the early phases when you're getting this spattering of gray and color grain color you are able to get those those packages of DNA back to where they were when you were young using some of the methods that we're talking about today

and we've talked about in other episodes and this has to do with those stem cells that produce pigment they melanocytes yep and these sit right next to our hair shafts they do and they they inject the color as the Keratin is being put together into that that hair shaft and the prevailing Theory as to why we get gray is that these melanocytes die through a process called apoptosis hopefully that isn't true I think it's true for very late in life but what we're seeing in this new study is that they become dysfunctional before they die

and that's a period that we have a chance to recover their function uh and prevent them from dying and there are a number of ways that I could think of at least to reverse that and prevent them from dying one way though would be to use some of these adversity mics to get that epigenome to reset that's what some researchers have done in mice at least in a fairly recent study actually this year um using a combination compound uh including uh cyclosporin a minoxidil which is the cream that we talked about earlier and then another

pigment promoting drug we dug into this a little today and got really excited by what we found yeah because the paper tries to obscure what this actual chemical is this age reversing um and pigment promoting drug turns out as called tacus which is a very similar molecule to Romy or also known as Camus which we've mentioned in earlier episodes is one of the main drugs that can extend lifespan and inhibit this complex of proteins called mtor that responds to fasting and like cyclosporin it's an immunosuppressant which means it's an adversity m it's it's showing your

cells that times are not all that great right now right it's making your stem cells freak out that things are going to be rough and maybe we should be rejuvenated and start growing a little better I just want to mention this cyclosporin a it's really interesting you said it's an immunosuppressant it's used to prevent organ rejection in my lab we found it also rejuvenates mitochondria through actually making sure that What's called the mitochondrial permeability transition pore or mptp is preserved long story short I think that this combination of cyclosporin a for mitochondrial activity minoxidil which

we' talked about is blood flow improved blood flow and this pigment promoting promoting drug which is basically an analog of rapy which simulate a fasting response is the triple combo for hair repigmentation this is not yet ready for human use undoubtedly there probably somebody trying this out in Hollywood but as of right now uh this is still sometime into the future I think so you know people are already trying rapy as a drug 10 migs every week or so this is this is only being done by a few people under doctor supervision but I could

imagine that there will be products made available to the general public one day that would definitely restore hair color it's not a miracle that this happens it's just science and we're going to figure it out and here's just like another one of those cases where when we address an aging pathway we're addressing things that are Downstream of that aging pathway and and this really relates I think really well to a general theme of what we've been talking about over the past few episodes which is probably the individual problems that come with aging that we talk

about right now are not the things that need to be addressed if we can hit aging somewhere Upstream of those problems yeah and another important point is that when we learn how to reverse aging in the skin and rejuvenate the hair and get it to produce more color those lessons can be app can be applied across the body because all cells have a fundamental root cause of aging and the same defense Pathways against that process so for instance Romy cyclosporin minoxidil these could be used perhaps in really low Doses and under clinical conditions tested to

see if they have rejuvenating effects in other organs as well so maybe right now we're trying to figure out how to help people keep their hair more colorful try to keep it in their scalp rather than on the floor but sometime down the road we could be addressing things that are uh far of far greater importance to far more people right and and we foresee a day in my lab where you can take a pill maybe three pills and you'll not just get younger but your hair will regrow and become dark again if you want

it to