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

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(-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.

Creatine supplementation affects glucose homeostasis but not insulin secretion in humans.

AIMS: In this study, it was investigated whether the glucose homeostasis is affected by dietary creatine supplementation. For this purpose, the plasma glucose concentration and the plasma insulin response to an oral glucose load were measured in creatine-supplemented vegetarians. METHODS: The subjects were supplemented with either 5 g of creatine monohydrate (creatine-treated group, CREAT) or 5 g of maltodextrin (control group, CON) per day for 42 days. On days 0 and 43, blood samples were collected before as well as 10, 20, and 30 min following an oral glucose load and analyzed for plasma creatine, insulin, and glucose levels. RESULTS: Creatine supplementation resulted in an increase in plasma creatine (CREAT 92.7 +/- 14.6 micro M vs. CON 31.2 +/- 3.2 micro M; p = 0.001). There was a trend (p = 0.07) towards elevated fasting plasma glucose levels following creatine supplementation, while the plasma glucose response to the glucose load was enhanced (CREAT 168.2 +/- 5.3 mM. min vs. CON 129.6 +/- 14.7 mM.min; p = 0.05). There was no difference observed in the plasma insulin response to the glucose load between the groups. CONCLUSION: This study shows that creatine supplementation may result in abnormalities in glucose homeostasis in the absence of changes in insulin secretion.