A March 2021 study (of mice) by Harvard University was,
"interested in understanding how stress affects stem cell biology and tissue biology, spurred in part by the fact that everyone has a story to share about what happens to their skin and hair when they are stressed. I realized that as a skin stem cell biologist, I could not provide a satisfying answer regarding if stress indeed has an impact -- and more importantly, if yes, what are the mechanisms,"
"The skin offers a tractable and accessible system to study this important problem in depth, and in this work, we found that stress does actually delay stem cell activation and fundamentally changes how frequently hair follicle stem cells regenerate tissues."
"This result suggests that elevated stress hormones indeed have a negative effect on hair follicle stem cells,"
"But the real surprise came when we took out the source of the stress hormones."
"So even the baseline level of stress hormone that's normally circulating in the body is an important regulator of the resting phase. Stress essentially just elevates this preexisting 'adrenal gland-hair follicle axis,' making it even more difficult for hair follicle stem cells to enter the growth phase to regenerate new hair follicles,"
"We first asked whether the stress hormone was regulating the stem cells directly and checked by taking out the receptor for corticosterone, but this turned out to be wrong. Instead, we found that the stress hormone actually acts on a cluster of dermal cells underneath the hair follicle, known as the dermal papilla,"
"Under both normal and stress conditions, adding Gas6 was sufficient to activate hair follicle stem cells that were in the resting phase and to promote hair growth,”
"In the future, the Gas6 pathway could be exploited for its potential in activating stem cells to promote hair growth. It will also be very interesting to explore if other stress-related tissue changes are related to the stress hormone's impact on regulating Gas6."
"When looking for factors that control stem cell behaviors, normally we would look locally in the skin. While there are important local factors, our findings suggest that the major switch for hair follicle stem cell activity is actually far away in the adrenal gland and it works by changing the threshold required for stem cell activation,”
"You can have systemic control of stem cell behavior located in a different organ that plays a really important role, and we are learning more and more examples of these 'cross-organ interactions.' Tissue biology is interconnected with body physiology. We still have so much to learn in this area, but we are constantly reminded by our findings that in order to understand stem cells in the skin, we often need to think beyond the skin."