Does creatine supplementation improve cognition or only muscle building?

What the evidence says

Creatine is a compound your muscles and brain use to make quick energy. It is well known for helping people build muscle and perform better in short, intense exercise like weightlifting or sprinting. This muscle-building effect is backed by decades of solid research.

The question of whether creatine also helps you think better is less settled. A systematic review looking at healthy people found that creatine supplements may improve short-term memory and reasoning skills, but had unclear or mixed effects on things like attention, reaction time, and long-term memory.

A larger and more recent review combining 16 trials found creatine improved memory, attention speed, and how fast people processed information, but did not clearly improve overall thinking ability or executive function, which covers planning and self-control. Benefits seemed bigger in people with certain health conditions, in adults aged 18 to 60, and in women.

In older adults, a systematic review found most studies did not show creatine improved general cognition, though a few individual studies suggested possible benefits for specific mental tasks. One well-designed randomized trial testing a modest daily dose over six weeks did not find clear cognitive improvement in that population.

Overall, creatine is considered safe and is approved as a supplement in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. But its brain benefits, if real, seem smaller and less consistent than its well-proven muscle benefits. Canadian researchers are actively studying creatine's effects on brain health, but there is no specific Canadian clinical guideline yet recommending it for cognitive improvement.