Along with hair loss and premature baldness, such issue as grey hair is one of the most topic concerns of modern people, related to aging and losing a good look. The good news is, soon this thing can be something of the past. A group of specialists at the Ito Lab at New York University’s Langone Medical Center reported about the experiments during which the scientists managed to identify a special substance, a protein, involved in causing our hair go grey. Based on these findings, the scientists suggest that finding a cure for grey hair can be much easier now.

It was well known before that the color of our hair is defined by special stem cells which control the growth and formation of our hair follicles and function along with melanocytes, special compounds also responsible for our hair color, as well as for producing our skin pigment.  After the experiments, the scientists successfully isolated a protein called ‘wnt’ which turned out to be vital for hair color production. And knowing about this secret element can eventually lead to a breakthrough of creating new formulas for producing special shampoos, hair lotions or creams which will simply boost levels of wnt and bring our hair color back.

The first experiments involved working with mice, and as soon as the scientists managed to block wnt pathway in relevant stem cells of the animals, their fur turned grey very fast. Piul Rabbani, one of the leaders of the study and a grad student in NYU’s Langone Medical Center, says: “Mouse and the human hairs are very similar in the way that they are structured and the way they contain melanocyte stem cells. We found that the wnt signaling pathway is activated the same way.”

If scientists will be able to create an effective treatment based on the findings of this research, it’ll have absolutely overwhelming demand among men and women over 30-35 throughout the world. In particular, it’ll have absolutely great demand among those women who regularly color their hair in order to bring back beautiful color of their hair. Having such a remedy will put to end frequent and costly trips of such women to the hairdresser’s, where they do necessary procedures to cover up the greying hair roots. The findings of this interesting and very promising study were recently published in the  journal Cell.