Life’s bad, grey patch
If you are in your late 20s I am sure you have looked in the mirror with a keen eye trying to spot those stray strands of grey hair. We use tweezers, hair colour, henna or just about anything to hide those nasty greys. So why not understand the enemy?
As we all know going grey is actually a natural part of growing old. Our hair consists of two entities, a shaft and a root. The shaft is what grows out of our scalp and contains the black, brown, red or blonde pigment giving us our hair colour. The root of each strand of hair is surrounded by the hair follicle tissue which contains the colour pigment. So does the pigment just die to make us grey? Why is going grey a part of ageing? Let’s understand some of these mysteries.
Typically the cells in our bodies make very small amounts of hyrdogen peroxide, which is an extremely reactive chemical. This chemical kills most bacteria (often used to clean a wound), but could also damage our cellular machinery. To combat that our cells make an enzyme called catalase that instantly deactivates the hydrogen peroxide rendering it harmless to our cells. But what happens eventually is that our body makes more hydrogen peroxide, especially in our hair than can be broken down. So there is a build-up of hyrdogen peroxide, which starts to destroy the tyrosinase enzyme in the hair follicle that is essential for the production of melanin, a pigment that gives us our hair colour.
As we all know different people grey at different rates. Which could be either due to their genetics or the environment in which they live. Like, we know that the genetic disease progeria causes rapid ageing, remember Amitabh Bachchan in Paa? There are diseases where your skin becomes white (vitiligo), and your hair turns white suddenly. If the hydrogen peroxide build-up is removed, the hair would turn back to its natural colour.
So then how can we get rid of the hyrogen peroxide? As it turns out that would be a bad idea. Our body needs the hydrogen peroxide to get rid of bacteria and other bugs. But what’s cool is that understanding the molecular mechanism within the tiny hair follicle might help us understand a lot about ageing in general. It depicts a unit that reflects our whole body. So maybe soon we might understand how to reverse the effects of ageing on our bodies and really look 18 till we die!
The writer is a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Genomics and is
working on skin cancer at Novartis
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