Science News: Brawny Brains: Creatine pills may aid memory and cognition

[Guest guest]

Hi,

 

Hopefully no one minds me posting this. My

apologies if so. I just saw the part about it

being good for vegetarians and felt obliged

to post it. Now I have to go looking for

creatine. Wonder if it's vegetarian . . . .

 

Gary

 

<http://www.sciencenews.org/20030816/fob4.asp>

 

" Brawny Brains: Creatine pills may aid memory and cognition

Ben Harder

 

The popular muscle-building supplement creatine can boost

performance on mental tests. Students preparing for exams

might benefit from taking creatine in much the way that

some competitive athletes do, an Australian neurochemist

suggests.

 

Creatine, an amino acid produced by the body and also

obtained from meat in a person's diet, helps cells store

ready-to-use energy. When taken during weight training,

pills containing synthetic creatine accelerate gains in

muscle strength. Creatine's popularity among athletes and

body builders fuels a market of more than $200 million per

year for the pills in the United States.

 

Increased blood flow to the brain accelerates metabolism

when someone confronts a challenging mental task, but an

energy debt in taxed brain cells can last for several seconds.

To see whether extra creatine could help meet the brain's

demands during quick thinking, Caroline Rae of the University

of Sydney and her colleagues gave a daily pill to each of

45 university students who were vegetarians. The researchers

suspected that creatine might help vegetarians more than

omnivores, who acquire the compound from their diets.

 

For 6 weeks, half the volunteers received pills containing

5 grams of creatine. The rest received sham pills. Researchers

tested all volunteers with a battery of memory and timed

analytical tasks at the beginning and end of the trial.

After 6 weeks' wait, the researchers conducted an identical

trial, except that volunteers got whichever treatment—creatine

or placebo—they hadn't received the first time. Neither the

volunteers nor the administrators of the tests were told who

was taking which pill at which time.

 

In both trials, volunteers receiving creatine scored better

than placebo-treated volunteers on measures of memory and

analytical skills, Rae and her colleagues will report in

the Oct. 22 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.

In one test, for example, volunteers taking creatine could

recall an average of 8.5 consecutive numerical digits, but

those receiving the placebo pill remembered only 7 digits.

 

The Australian government funded the research. Past studies

had suggested that creatine supplements can protect against

the effects of certain neurological diseases.

 

The new findings are " truly remarkable, " says Markus Wyss of

Roche Vitamins in Basel, Switzerland. Roche does not currently

sell creatine supplements, he says.

 

" This is the first study to show a beneficial effect of

creatine supplementation on mental performance. If confirmed,

the findings may . . . justify much broader use of creatine, "

Wyss says. " Nevertheless, [larger] studies need to be performed

before the potential impact on human health can be fully

judged. "

 

If people use creatine to enhance memory and mental performance,

they might take it for years at a stretch, Wyss says. The

long-term safety of creatine supplementation hasn't been well

tested, but the compound can exacerbate health problems in

people with diabetes or kidney dysfunction.

 

Ronald L. Terjung of the University of Missouri in Columbia

questions whether nonvegetarians would enjoy the creatine

benefits observed in the study. He also says that, despite

the study's design, volunteers may have known when they were

getting the real supplements. Creatine can cause bad breath,

flatulence, and weight gain from excess water retention—cues

that might have encouraged volunteers to unconsciously push

harder on the tests, he suggests. "