Alopecia areata can be treated with medications such as prednisone, which allow the body to stop its immune response.
For centuries, there have been reports of people suddenly seeing their hair turn white from fear or extremely stressful circumstances. According to many accounts, Marie Antoinette had white hair the night before her execution. While this makes the story more dramatic, the evidence suggests that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white much earlier, and the process was not sudden.
Some studies suggest that chronic stress can speed up the aging process in some people.
The problem with all the reports of people suddenly experiencing their hair turning gray is that this is not possible. White or gray hair starts at the hair shaft, so the hair on your head is already dead material. You can’t suddenly change color unless you visit a local salon. Newly white hair should grow from the root at the normal rate of hair growth, making the overnight process of fearful gray hair an unlikely scenario.
Hyperthyroidism can cause sudden and significant hair loss.
Still, there are many who insist that people go gray overnight under extreme stress. It may look like a person has suddenly woken up with gray hair. This process requires that the person already have many gray hairs or gray hair before the change.
What can happen to hair under very stressful circumstances is that some strands can fall out, in a condition called diffuse alopecia areata. This condition results in significant hair loss and occurs rapidly. In such cases, uncolored hair may fall out, while some white or gray hair remains. This would give the impression that the hair had turned white overnight. In fact, what really happened is that someone lost a lot of colored hair in a short time.
Alopecia areata tends not to happen overnight, but it can happen suddenly. It tends to be related to autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s cells suddenly see the hair cells as foreign matter and attack them.
There are several disorders and conditions that can cause patchy hair loss.
The result can be bald patches on the head and, in the worst cases, on the entire body. Alopecia areata is usually treated with medications such as prednisone, which allow the body to stop its immune response. Prednisone treatments did not become available until the 20th century, perhaps explaining more of the earlier “overnight white” stories.
It’s not clear what triggers alopecia areata, but it can occur in men, women, and children. In people with a lot of gray, this can make it look like the hair has suddenly turned white. This would also result in patchy baldness, thus making the hair look thin. Other causes of sudden baldness include severe cases of ringworm, which was not uncommon in earlier centuries, or severe hyperthyroidism, which can cause sudden and significant hair loss.
Reports of people suddenly turning gray are essentially urban legends. It is more reasonable to say that if the hair suddenly appeared white, it was due to a significant loss of colored hair.