Stress-busting drug offers cure to baldness

US researchers studying the effects of stress on the gut may have stumbled on a chemical compound that stimulates hair growth.

By blocking a stress-related hormone linked with hair loss, mutant mice that made too much of the hormone were able to regrow hair they had lost, the team reported on Wednesday in the online journal PLO One. "Almost 100% of the mice responded. The hair grows back fully. It is a very dramatic effect," Million Mulugeta of the University of California at Los Angeles, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

Moulage said the findings could open new areas of research on hair loss in humans, especially in people whose hair loss is caused by stress and aging. The team, which included researchers from the Veterans Administration and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, had been experimenting on mice that were genetically altered to overproduce a stress hormone called corticotrophinreleasing factor or CRF.

As these chronically stressed mice age, their hair turns gray and eventually falls off their backs. Mulugeta likens the effect to watching a US president age over the course of two four-year terms in the White House.

The team injected these mice with a stress-blocking chemical compound called astressin-B, which blocks the action of the stress hormone CRF. The mutant mice got a daily injection of the compound over five days, then the team measured the effects of this drug on their colons and put the mice back in their cages.

"When we came back three months later, their hair had all grown back. They were not distinguishable from their littermates who were not genetically altered," Mulugeta said. "It was totally unexpected."

The effect lasted up to four months, a relatively long time in the life span of a mouse, Mulugeta said.

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