Creatine and Possible Benefits to Parkinson’s Disease Victims

Creatine, also known as creatine monohydrate, creatine phosphate or creatine citrate, is a naturally occurring amino acid compound in your body that is made by your liver and facilitates the production of energy in your body. Most of the creatine is stored in your skeletal muscles and the rest is found in your brain, heart and testes. You can eat foods that have creatine, such as red meat and fish. However, creatine is also available in supplement form through health food and drug stores.

Promoted in supplement form as an energy enhancement, creatine use is encouraged by the exercise and bodybuilding industries to increase exercise performance. It is this long-standing benefit that has lead scientists to organize large-scale national clinical trials of the product to determine if creatine can have a beneficial effect on symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Classified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a nutritional supplement, creatine is widely used by professional athletes and is considered safe for daily supplemental use.

Researchers have also concluded that creatine increases the available energy for brain nerve cells and that this process helps prevent the loss of mitochondria. As a result it has positive effect on the health and survival of your nerve cell. Recognizing that an increase in cellular energy is beneficial to the health of your nerve cells, researchers believe that the addition of creatine to the diet will prevent injury and the premature death of the neurotransmitters and cells of your brain that are affected by Parkinson’s disease.

The symptoms of Parkinson’s, progressively uncontrollable shaking of the limbs and degeneration in the ability to speak, result from a reduction of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which helps control movement. It is the hope of researchers that the introduction of creatine will increase the neurological response between brain cells and result in a potential treatment for the sufferers of Parkinson’s disease.

In prior 18 month clinical trials of several potential Parkinson’s treatments, in which the trials were designed to eliminate those that are proven to be futile, results indicated that creatine being noted as warranting of further large scale clinical study for efficacy. Researchers also noted that creatine was well tolerated by test subjects. Prior research on creatine, unrelated to study of Parkinson’s disease or its treatment, have also resulted in no long term or serious side effects.

The research studies to determine whether creatine will be instrumental in arresting the progression of Parkinson’s disease will last for 5 to 7 years. The subjects will be those that have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the last five years and have been treated for two years or less with drugs that increase the levels of dopamine in the brain. Additional benefits of creatine, which have researchers optimistic in the study outcome, include its antioxidant properties that have been shown to prevent brain cell loss in laboratory mice that are affected with Parkinson’s disease. Researchers are encouraged by this revelation, and hope to prove the same effects of creatine to be present in human test subjects.