Dr. Darren Candow

And a couple of single arm studies came out last year by Matt Taylor and Aaron Smith showing that 20 grams a day for eight weeks did increase brain creatine levels in Alzheimer's patients.

And it seemed to improve measures of memory and cognition there as well.

So again, using the same mechanisms, it decreases inflammation, it maintains brain bioenergetics, and it might actually have a neural protection effect as well.

There's

Evidence in cell cultures and in rodents that there's some lines there, but in humans, we're still in the infancy.

But if it can have any benefit to any neurological disease, it's huge.

And there's a lot of hope, especially around Alzheimer's.

And that one's really exciting.

And I think more future studies will come out.

The limitation with those is that there was no placebo to compare to.

But again, it's just showing that, yes, creatine can be used as an effective adjunct.

Yeah.

Excellent point.

So the best lines of evidence here come from clinical depression and anxiety.

The group out of Utah in the United States have clearly shown that creatine, in addition to other therapies, so this is important, creatine by itself has never been shown to be a standalone, but with SSRIs or cognitive behavior therapy or methamphetamine use in populations under medical supervision, the addition of creatine

seem to improve symptoms.

And it's likely going back to all the ones we've already talked about, where it improves bioenergetics, it improves neurotransmission or neuromodulation.

But it also, in animals, has been shown to improve a protein called BDNF.

So this protein is involved in brain plasticity.

So there's a whole bunch of emerging evidence and hope that creatine one day will be used as a treatment in the toolbox for a lot of these clinical issues.