This week, in Bizarre Patient: an 85-year-old patient with snowy hair sees his hair regain its original color in places!
Your temples are starting to turn gray, and you dream of recovering the beautiful shades of your hair? This is precisely what happened to this 85-year-old man, who showed up at a dermatology clinic with white hair that had turned brown again in a few months, reports theAmerican Journal Of Medicine
Unfortunately, this symptom is rarely a harbinger of good news, and an investigation of the patient revealed that he had previously been diagnosed with melanoma and skin cancerskin cancer in the past, raising fears of relapserelapse. Subsequently, a biopsy revealed the presence of melanoma in situ — confined to the superficial layer of skin — which has been surgically removed.
A warning sign of melanoma
Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that develops from melanocytes, the cells responsible for producing melanin, the pigment that gives skin its colorcolor to the skin, hair and eyeseyes.
This case of repigmentation is rare, but it is not isolated: three years earlier, Spanish doctors had reported the case of an 80-year-old man with a lock of black hair on the top of the head, developed during the year. In his case, no melanoma could be detected, but a excisionexcision was still carried out in order to remove the affected area, the analysis of which then revealed the presence of cancer.
If hair repigmentation is a rather worrying sign, it has the positive side that it is an early sign of the disease.
The exception to the rule
There is, however, one case where hair repigmentation is associated with good news: that of an immunotherapy treatment offered to around fifteen patients suffering from bronchial cancer. In the majority of them, repigmentation occurred, associated with a good clinical response to treatment.
A surprising side effect that could be explained by the activation of the immune system, leading to an autoimmune response directed against melanocytes — the cells responsible for producing melanin — and could stimulate their proliferation and activation, leading to increased production of melanin, hence repigmentation of hair.
In the case of cancers, the presence of a melanoma can induce a local inflammatory response in the surrounding tissue, stimulating the production of melanin by melanocytes. This stimulationstimulation Melanogenesis can lead to repigmentation of hair in areas affected by melanoma.
