Creatine and brain health: what the evidence supports

Searches for “creatine for brain” rose 118% year over year, according to Glimpse’s trend data as of January 2026, one of the fastest-growing supplement topics. A 2026 systematic review in Nutrition Reviews found that five of six studies in older adults reported cognitive benefits or associations, but rated the certainty of the evidence as low.

What did the review of creatine and cognition in older adults find?

The Nutrition Reviews systematic review included six articles covering 1,542 participants (55.7% women) with mean ages from 66.8 to 76.4 years. Two kinds of studies were pooled:

• Intervention studies, which used creatine at about 5 g a day (in one, four 5 g doses a day for a loading week, then 5 g daily).
• Observational studies, which estimated dietary creatine intake from recall, ranging from about 0.13 to 2.45 g a day.

Five of the six studies (83.3%) reported positive associations, most often in memory and attention. Tasks included selective attention, visuospatial memory and executive function. The authors concluded that the limited evidence “suggests that creatine may be associated with benefits for cognition in generally healthy older adults.”

Why is the certainty of the evidence rated low?

Because of how the studies were built. The review rated one study as good quality, two as fair and three as poor. Most designs were cross-sectional, which can show that two things go together but not that one causes the other. Dietary creatine was estimated by recall rather than measured, and there were too few high-quality randomised trials to establish cause.

Practical reading: the direction is encouraging, and the strength is modest. A finding that older adults who consume more creatine tend to score better on memory tasks could reflect creatine, or could reflect other differences in how those people eat and live.

The search surge itself is worth noting. Trend data show interest, not evidence. A supplement can be popular long before the trials that would settle its benefit exist, and this one sits in exactly that gap.

Whether any one person’s memory or attention responds is also a question that group averages cannot answer. Studies like this report the mean across participants, so individual responses can differ. Measuring an outcome before and after, against one’s own baseline, is the kind of design that speaks to that.

The bottom line

• A 2026 systematic review of six studies (1,542 older adults) found five reporting positive cognitive associations, mostly memory and attention.
• The certainty of evidence was rated low: most studies were cross-sectional and only one was rated good quality.
• More randomised trials are needed before creatine’s effect on cognition can be stated with confidence.