|
|
|
|
|
|
by brad0
3280 days ago
|
|
|
This is interesting! I only knew it as a muscle building supplement. It's role is to store water inside your muscles, making them larger. I don't know of any effects on the brain and I would be cautious of taking something that it wasn't made for. In saying that there's been a number of cases where pharmaceutical products were developed for one issue but the side effects ended up being the actual product. I was taking a high load of creatine for body building six months after a major concussion (motorbike accident). I can't say that I noticed any change in brain function. Where did you hear that creatine affects brain function? |
|
|
Creatine phosphate is part of a reaction making ATP use effective (specifically: it allows rapid conversion of ADP to ATP during times of high demand). This is necessary for basic functioning - we synthesize creatine naturally and also absorb it from our diet. Supplementing it enables using muscles for a longer period without exhaustion, and helps you reach the boundaries of muscular strength before you reach energy limits.
The proposed mechanism of improved brain functioning is, interestingly, the same as the muscular mechanism. During times of high demand, creatine improves ATP regeneration rates. The ATP cycle happens the same way in the brain, so creatine can play the same role there. This claim is nothing new, it was for instance studied back in 2003 here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691485/pdf/1456...).
There's no mysterious second effect here - we know for certain that creatine plays the same role in the brain and muscles. (We also know what that effect is - it wouldn't have any relationship to physical damage sustained in a concussion.) The outstanding questions are whether improving ATP cycling in the brain has a meaningful impact on performance, and whether safe creatine supplementation changes neurological PCr levels enough to cause that benefit.