Graying Hair May Reveal Cancer Clues

Those gray hairs that increasingly leer back from the bathroom mirror may have some value after all. Cancer researchers have developed an explanation for graying hair that they hope will shed light on the most dangerous type of skin cancer.

“Preventing the graying of hair is not our goal,” said Dr. David E. Fisher of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“What we really want is to come up with treatments for melanoma,” he said. Melanoma is the malignant form of melanocytes, the cells that help color hair and skin, and it is resistant to chemotherapy and radiation.

Fisher’s team found that hair goes gray when melanocytes become depleted. The scalp contains a reservoir of adult stem cells that provide a supply of these color-making cells. But as the body ages these cells become depleted and sometimes begin to develop in the wrong part of the hair follicle.

They want to know why the melanocyte cells begin dying off as the body ages.

The research was published online by the journal Science.