Tired of your receding hairline? Well, now there is a cure — if you are a stressed out mouse.

Meet Dr. Million Mulugeta, co-director of the preclinical stress biology program at UCLA, and the man set to help legions of patchy mice regain confidence in their fur.

He didn’t plan on it being that way.

“It was a totally unexpected finding,” Mulgeta told the Star.

Mulugeta and his team of scientists originally set up an experiment to examine a chemical compound that blocks the effects of stress on the gut.

The genetically engineered balding mice, whose hair loss was attributed to high levels of a stress hormone, were treated with the compound for five days before being placed back in their cage.

But what were once balding mice soon became difficult to spot amongst their luscious haired cohorts.

“The first observation was an accident,” Mulugeta said. “Three months (after injecting the mice) we were surprised to see they looked very similar to the non-genetically engineered mice in the cage. To our surprise we couldn’t tell which one was which and we started to ask ourselves how this had happened.”

The team uncovered that when injected with the compound astressin-B, mice suffering from fur loss due to the overproducing a stress hormone, regained 50 to 90 per cent of their hair over a four week period.

The team continued to watch the mice for four months, and none of them lost their new-found locks.

In another experiment, young mice were injected with astressin-B before their fur began to fall out. Those mice never went bald, said Mulugeta, suggesting the compound could also be used as a preventative treatment for hair loss.

But while the mice squeak with glee, the study doesn’t mean a cure for balding humans is coming any time soon.

“Hair growth and hair cycles are different in mice than they are in humans and it somewhat of a leap to apply the results of this study to humans,” says Dr. Jeff Donovan, a hair loss specialist at Sunnybrook Hospital, “but there is still potential that interesting therapies could be developed in the future, but it is a little early to make that conclusion.”

And while stressed out mice might loss their hair, most hair loss in humans is typically a result of genetics — not stress, Donovan points out.

Mulugeta agrees: “It is a very different hair cycle: in humans (it is) years, in mice it is weeks,” he said. “But based on the fact that hair growth in humans and mice is cyclical, that the molecules controlling it are comparable and the fact that the stress hormone molecules we worked on are very similar in human and mice skin, these indicators point to a possible effect of this antagonist on humans too, but it has to be investigated further.”

It is not known how astressin-B triggered hair growth in the mice, but Mulugeta and his study’s co-author Dr. Lixin Wang speculate it could come down to how the compound alters the hair follicle.

“We know that the stress hormone exist in the skin and the hair follicles, but we don’t know what the connection is, we need to find the molecules and target the path they work on,” Wang said.

Mulugeta and his team also found that the injections affected the mice’s skin pigment. Does this mean the compound could have the potential to affect hair colour, including grey hair?

“That’s probably a bit of a leap,” Donovan says. “The process by which individuals develop grey hair is very complex and genetically and hormonally governed and stress plays a very little role, despite the myth, so it is not clear what we can make of the information.”

But there is always hope.

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“It would be exciting if down the road that there was a therapy that could restore hair growth in people who have hair loss from stress,” he says. “Right now our (relaxation) treatments improve people’s quality of life but don’t help with hair loss.”

Mulugeta points out that while a cure to baldness may not be around the corner the research changes the way science looks at hair loss.

“The fact that hair loss in not a permanent loss that it can be reversed, this idea of reversibility really opens door for other approaches to look, this study clearly shows hair loss can be reversed,” Mulugeta said.