Oral creatine monohydrate supplementation improves brain performance: a double–blind, placebo–controlled, cross–over trial

Abstract

Creatine supplementation is in widespread use to enhance sports-fitness performance, and has been trialled successfully in the treatment of neurological, neuromuscular and atherosclerotic disease. Creatine plays a pivotal role in brain energy homeostasis, being a temporal and spatial buffer for cytosolic and mitochondrial pools of the cellular energy currency, adenosine triphosphate and its regulator, adenosine diphosphate. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that oral creatine supplementation (5 g d 2 1 for six weeks) would enhance intelligence test scores and working memory performance in 45 young adult, vegetarian subjects in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over design. Creatine supplementation had a significant positive effect ( p , 0.0001) on both working memory (backward digit span) and intelligence (Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices), both tasks that require speed of processing. These findings underline a dynamic and significant role of brain energy capacity in influencing brain performance.

Cyclocreatine treatment improves cognition in mice with creatine transporter deficiency

“…Although we have not measured action potential trains or conduction velocities, our present studies demonstrate cognitive benefits manifest in Slc6a8 -/y mice after cyclocreatine treatment. This is consistent with other reports that creatine supplementation can improve cognitive performance parameters of healthy human subjects when brain creatine is increased (42,43). It may be that with cyclocreatine phosphate, the ATP concentration was buffered; this was demonstrated by Woznicki et al, who showed that cyclocreatine phosphate indeed functions as an ATP buffer, like phosphocreatine, in the mouse brain in vivo (31).…”

Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges

“…Increases in glucose availability, from the ingestion of sugars or the release of the acute stress hormone norepinephrine, improve memory (Wenk 1989;Foster et al 1998), with the effects being particularly pronounced in demanding tasks (Sunram-Lea et al 2002). Creatine, a nutrient that improves energy availability, also appears to benefit overall cognitive performance (Rae et al 2003) and reduce mental fatigue (Watanabe et al 2002;McMorris et al 2006). Besides being an energy source, food can contribute to cognition by providing amino acids needed in the production of neurotransmitters, which is particularly important during periods of stress or sustained concentration (Banderet and Lieberman 1989;Deijen et al 1999;Lieberman 2003).…”

Biomarkers and long-term labour market outcomes: The case of creatine

“…Effort is multi-dimensional and may show up in a variety of ways in a job context. sequences of numbers from memory and had higher overall IQ scores (Rae et al, 2003).…”