Gray Hair and Vitiligo Apparently Reversed by Same New Compound

Hair dye manufacturers are on notice: the cure for gray hair is coming. That's right, the need to cover up one of the classic signs of aging with chemical pigments will likely be a thing of the past thanks to a team of European researchers. According to a new research report published online on April 29, 2013 in The FASEB Journal, people who are going gray develop massive oxidative stress via accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicle, which causes their hair to bleach itself from the inside out, and most importantly, the report shows that this massive accumulation of hydrogen peroxide can be remedied with a proprietary treatment developed by the researchers and described as a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS (a modified pseudocatalase). What's more, the study also shows that the same treatment works for the skin condition, vitiligo. "To date, it is beyond any doubt that the sudden loss of the inherited skin and localized hair color can affect those individuals in many fundamental ways," said Karin U. Schallreuter, M.D., study author from the Institute for Pigmentary Disorders in association with E.M. Arndt University of Greifswald, Germany and the Centre for Skin Sciences, School of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. "The improvement of quality of life after total and even partial successful repigmentation has been documented." To achieve this breakthrough, Dr. Schallreuter and colleagues analyzed an international group of 2,411 patients with vitiligo. Of that group, 57 or 2.4 percent were diagnosed with strictly segmental vitiligo (SSV), and 76 or 3.2 percent were diagnosed with mixed vitiligo, which is SSV plus non-segmental vitiligo (NSV).
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