Creatine's gains are small, repeatable, and reach into old age

Twenty of the 23 trials in one analysis enrolled only men, and just 40 women appear across its two female-only trials, so the weaker showing in women reflects how little has been measured rather than a settled absence. Gains were most consistent in younger adults. And these are pooled averages, not what any one lifter should expect.

The lean-mass figure is the solid one; the fat-loss figure ran anywhere from 1.34kg down to 0.11kg, close enough to nothing at one end that the effect there is unsettled. Everyone pooled here was under 50. In a small share of the trials, how people were assigned or assessed left room for the result to tilt.

The pooled training ran about 12.6 weeks on average, so nothing here shows whether the gains hold over a year. The pool of qualifying trials is small, and the authors ask for more work in this age group before the functional gains are treated as durable.

These trials were built to test performance rather than to hunt for harm, so anything rare or slow enough to slip past them would have slipped past. The adverse-event reports are filed voluntarily, which distorts the count in both directions. Average intake across the pooled trials was about 12.5g of creatine a day.

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.

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.