It has been discovered that stress plays an important role in hair loss besides in graying of hair. Overall these years, various hair restoration solutions have emerged which range from hucksters to legitimate medications. But even the most effective solutions have shown limited results.

According to WebMD, “There are many types of hair loss, also called alopecia:

“Gradual thinning of hair with age is a natural condition known as involutional alopecia. More and more hair follicles go into a telogen, or resting, phase, and the remaining hairs become shorter and fewer in number.”

“Androgenic alopecia is another form of hair loss. It’s a genetically predisposed condition that can affect both men and women. Men with this condition can begin suffering hair loss as early as their teens or early 20s, while most women don’t experience noticeable thinning until their 40s or later.”

A team has been set up from UCLA and Veterans Administration to investigate how stress has influence on gastrointestinal function. They discovered a chemical compound which is responsible for inducing hair growth by blocking the stress related hormone. Million Mulugeta, professor of medicine at David Geffen School of medicine, says that the findings of their research on mutant mice show that a short term treatment of this chemical compound causes beyond belief hair growth.

This in turn may also unlock new venues for treating hair loss in human beings by modulation of the anxiety hormone receptors, especially when the hair loss is related to aging and chronic stress.

For study, those mice who were genetically alerted to overproduce stress hormones were used. As these mice aged, they tend to have hair loss eventually making them bald on their backs. The researchers of Salk Institute developed a chemical compound called astressin-B, which had the capability to block CRF. This astressin-B compound was injected into bald mice to scrutinize the CRF blocking ability.

The first single injection showed no effect, which made the investigators inject this compound continuously for 5 days. Three months later, the researchers returned to the mice and to their astonishment they discovered that the mice had re-grown hair on their bald backs. The study proved that it was astressin-B peptide which was accountable for extraordinary hair growth on the hairless mice.

One shot every day for five consecutive days showed its effect for up to 4 months. Till now this effect has been noticed in mice only, but researches are curious to conduct this on humans also. This experiment is an offshoot of a study which was funded by the National Institutes of health.