Does one dose of creatine supplementation fit all?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the late 1990s, there has been substantial research investigating the beneficial effects of creatine supplementation on measures of muscle accretion and performance, bone structure, and brain function across a variety of populations. However, the optimal dose of creatine needed to achieve these benefits is unclear. Further, whether a ‘tissue-creatine dose relationship’ exists is unknown. In general, a creatine-loading phase (20 grams/day for ≤ 7 days), with and without a creatine maintenance phase (i.e., 3-5 grams/day) appears sufficient to produce skeletal muscle benefits. Alternatively, a relative dosing strategy of 0.10-0.14 grams of creatine/kg/day appears to be a viable option, especially for healthy older adults. Beyond skeletal muscle, a small body of research shows that creatine supplementation can have favourable effects on measures of bone biology and structure in both disease state populations and healthy older adults. The relative dosing strategy of 0.10-0.14 grams of creatine/kg/day and exercise training produces the most consistent bone benefits. From a brain perspective, both absolute and relative creatine dosing strategies are effective for increasing brain creatine levels but the optimal dosage and/or duration of ingestion to enhance brain function is unclear. Overall, there is evidence that ≥ 20 grams/day or 0.3 grams/kg/day for ≤ 7 days or ≥ 4 grams/day for several months is likely required to increase total brain creatine concentrations. Confounding variables such as baseline (pre-supplementation) tissue creatine levels, muscle fiber morphology, bone remodelling/repair processes, brain bioenergetics, habitual dietary intake of creatine, biological sex, age, and physical activity likely dictate the dose of creatine required to produce a meaningful tissue response. The purpose of this narrative review is to (1) summarize the effects of different creatine supplementation protocols on tissue accumulation in skeletal muscle, bone, and brain, (2) discuss variables that likely influence the tissue’s responsiveness to creatine supplementation, and (3) determine whether creatine supplementation improves measures of muscle, bone or brain health and performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".