Science

Washington –  A research team in the United States studying the effects of an anti-stress treatment made the astonishing discovery that the compound also caused bald mice to regrow lost hair, a study revealed.

The online journal PLoS published Thursday the joint research of the California-based Salk Institute, the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA, and the Veterans Administration, whose goal was to determine the effects of stress on gastrointestinal function.

To do so, they experimented with mutant mice genetically altered to produce an excess of a stress-generating hormone that turned their hair white and left their backs bald.

The scientists, who were specifically studying the effects of stress on mice colons, injected them for five days with the astressin-B compound, developed to block the effect of the stress hormone.

Three months after measuring the compound's impact on the intestinal tract, the team found that the lost hair had grown back again, and that it was impossible to distinguish them from other mice in the cage that had not gone bald as a result of the experiment.

"Our findings show that a short-duration treatment with this compound causes an astounding long-term hair regrowth in chronically stressed mutant mice," the UCLA researcher Million Mulugueta, one of the authors of the study, said.

The effect of regrowing hair lasted a total of four months after being injected just once a day for five consecutive days, a period that Mulugueta considered a "comparatively long time, considering that mice's life span is less than two years."

The researchers repeated the study several times and all produced the same results, according to the expert, who added that the same compound injected in mice with hair was able to prevent baldness.

Up to now, astressin-B has only been used on mice and there is no guarantee that it would have the same effect on humans.

Nonetheless, the team found reason for hope when they injected bald mice with an existing baldness treatment, minoxidil, and it produced "mild hair growth" in the animals, just as it does on humans.