Dr. Steven Novella

speaker

11,445 appearances 18 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard yesterday

Dr. Steven Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #1063 - Nov 22 2025 podcast

That's not a lot for a systematic review, but it's not nothing. voice-verified

492 participants in total. voice-verified

Again, that's not a lot, especially for 16 studies. voice-verified

That means they're mostly small studies. voice-verified

So that's an overall modest amount of data. voice-verified

This is telling me this is preliminary research. voice-verified

So they found that creatine supplementation showed significant positive effects on memory, attention time, and processing speed. voice-verified

But no significant improvements were found on overall cognitive function. voice-verified

That seems like a big thing. voice-verified

Or executive function. voice-verified

So it kind of sounds like it's like, all right, there's some improvement on components of thinking, but it didn't improve your overall cognitive function and didn't improve your executive function. voice-verified

So they also did a subgroup analysis to show that the effect was more significant in people with diseases. voice-verified

Those aged 18 to 60, not sure about what that means, and females, again, not sure what that means. voice-verified

So how do we make sense of all this data? voice-verified

First, these results are a bit mixed, right? voice-verified

It's not a clear, consistent signal. voice-verified

It shows improvement in some things but not others. voice-verified

Also, there's a kind of quirky subsets of people to be affected by it. voice-verified

Yeah, right. voice-verified

So that tells me that this could just be an artifact of small studies looking at a lot of variables and some things are going to come up positive, right? voice-verified

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