Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function even without exercise | Hacker News Reader

Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function even without exercise

psypost.org

18 pointsgeox12 comments

this article is garbage, likely just written by AI without any proofreading. so many things in the article are wrong after reading the study a bit. for example, study says 73 people, article says 64. Article says only part of the participants were in a caloric deficit. Study says "All participants followed a diet plan aligned with the American Heart Association's macronutrient recommendations (55% carbohydrate, 15% protein, 30% fat) to induce a modest energy deficit of approximately 300–500 kcal/day.". etc, etc

skip the article, read the study at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15502783.2026.2...

You may be right about the article but 64 is the correct number:

    64 completed week 12 and were included in the repeated-measures analysis.

Presumably they used intent to treat though, so 73 pp data were analysed.

Don't you normally have about a kilo (or 500g?) excess as backup energy stored in your muscles and liver(?)? Why would taking a few dozen grams help?

Locked up and waiting for signals to release doesn't do much good.

The question is: does it increase muscle nuclei or just water volume?

good question, and DXA won't tell you the answer there (they used DXA in the study) So not an especially convincing study in that case, since creatine leads to increased water retention.

(A meta analysis)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5679696/?utm_source...

> For example, over 8 weeks of resistance training in young men, creatine supplementation resulted in a faster increase in satellite cell number, myonuclei per muscle fiber, and muscle fiber size.

that's an entirely different study with different goals

The question was asked whether creatine increases muscle nuclei or just water volume, and I provided a study (well, a meta-study which is referring to a specific study) which showed that creatine supplementation increased the muscle nuclei compared to no supplementation. The specific study referred to is titled "Creatine supplementation augments the increase in satellite cell and myonuclei number in human skeletal muscle induced by strength training"

the interesting claim about the study in the OP is that creatine increases muscle mass in non-trained/sedentary individuals. i haven't seen that claim previously (backed by a study) and took the question from user "15155" to be about that specifically. the claim that it increases muscle mass when combined with resistance training seems to be long-settled though

> resistance training

Yes, but what about sedentary individuals?

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