Researchers at Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany gave healthy adults a single high dose of creatine partway through 21 hours of staying awake and used brain imaging to see whether it changed how the sleep-deprived brain performed.
Each of 15 young adults went through the sleepless night twice, once with creatine and once with placebo. On creatine they performed better and processed faster, and brain scans showed more phosphocreatine, the molecule cells draw on for quick energy, relative to spent phosphate.
Measurements ran only 7.5 hours after the dose, so this showed a short-term buffer against one night of lost sleep, not a substitute for it. The dose used was far higher than a typical daily supplement amount, and the study did not test repeated sleepless nights.
Read the original study
Gordji-Nejad et al., Scientific Reports, 2024 · doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54249-9
Borrowed brain energy, bought with a single dose.
Source
- Gordji-Nejad, A., Matusch, A., Kleedörfer, S., Jayeshkumar Patel, H., Drzezga, A., Elmenhorst, D., Binkofski, F., & Bauer, A. (2024). Single dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high energy phosphates during sleep deprivation. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 4937. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54249-9