Creatine may help memory if you are 66 or older, not younger
A pooling of 8 trials reported a memory benefit across healthy adults. Once double-counted scores were fixed, only the benefit in adults aged 66 to 76 held.
What the study found
The memory benefit survived correction only in older adults
The headline did not survive the arithmetic. A 2022 pooling of 8 trials reported that creatine improved memory across healthy adults; once a double-counting error was fixed, the overall effect fell away, while the benefit in adults aged 66 to 76 stayed significant.
The caveat · Older-adult gain rests on few trials
The corrected reanalysis is the original authors' own reply rather than an independent check. The surviving older-adult effect rests on a small number of trials within those 8. And in younger adults the effect was flat before the correction and flat after it.
What we don't know
A memory benefit reported across healthy adults vanished once scores from the same people stopped being counted as different people. The effect in 66-to-76-year-olds survived that correction, and it is the finding worth weighing.