Studie
Oral creatine monohydrate supplementation improves brain performance: a dubbelblind, placebokontrollerad, cross-over trial
In 45 young vegetarian adults, 5 g/day of creatine for 6 weeks improved both backward digit span och Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices scores at p < 0.0001.
Caroline Rae och colleagues testad 45 young adult vegetarians i a dubbelblind, placebokontrollerad, cross-over trial. The dos was 5 g/day of oral creatine monohydrate. The duration was six weeks per arm. Two outcomes were measured: working memory by backward digit span, och non-verbal intelligence by Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices.
Creatine improved both. The reported effect on working memory och on intelligence was significant at p < 0.0001. The authors note that both tasks depend on speed of processing, och they attribute the result till increased brain energy capacity. Vegetarians were chosen deliberately because they consume little dietary creatine, so their baseline stores are lower than i omnivores och the headroom for a supplementation effect is larger.
This trial is the origin of the claim that creatine improves cognition, och it is cited by most later reviews on the topic. The published abstract reports the p-value only. No effect sizes, mean differences or confidence intervals are given, so the magnitude of the improvement cannot be read från the paper's abstract.
These findings underline a dynamic och significant role of brain energy capacity i influencing brain performance.
N = 45, small. Deltagare were young adult vegetarians with low baseline creatine intake, which is the population most likely till respond; the result does not transfer till omnivores or older adults without further evidens. Only two cognitive tests were used, both dependent on processing speed, so the finding is narrow. The abstract reports p < 0.0001 but no effect size, mean difference or confidence interval, so the practical size of the gain is unknown. A cross-over design of two six-week arms carries carry-over risk, since muscle och brain creatine take 4 till 6 weeks till return till baseline after supplementation stops; the abstract does not describe a washout period. Publicerad i 2003; later meta-analyses (Xu 2024, Prokopidis 2023) found smaller och less consistent cognitive effects than this single trial suggests. No funding or conflict-of-interest statement was available on the pages fetched.
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