Creatine Studied as Dystrophy Drug
The food supplement creatine, used by many athletes to increase their strength, can also increase the strength of patients with muscular dystrophy and other wasting diseases, researchers report in a study to be released today.
The new finding comes on the heels of an animal study suggesting that creatine is twice as effective in controlling symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, as the only drug now marketed for treating it.
The results hint that creatine could be useful for large numbers of people who suffer muscle weakness caused by disease or aging, said Dr. Leon Charash, chairman of the Muscular Dystrophy Assn.’s medical advisory committee.
Because creatine is widely available in health food stores and is “essentially nontoxic” in recommended doses, he predicted that hundreds of thousands of people may rush out to try it, and “it would be hard for a physician to discourage it.”
“If a family called me and asked if they should try it, I would be hard pressed to say, ‘Don’t.’ ”
Already, he noted, the Muscular Dystrophy Assn. is organizing a large clinical trial of creatine at Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts General Hospital and Cornell University. That study will compare it against a placebo to determine if it is truly beneficial.
But other experts urged caution, noting that the drug has only been studied in a small number of patients, and for a short period of time.
“I’m basically skeptical,” Dr. Audrey Penn of the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke told Associated Press. “I have a feeling that over the longer term, it might not be such an exciting result.”
Penn noted that creatine--a naturally occurring chemical that the body uses to store energy in muscles--had been tried in children with muscular dystrophy in the 1950s and abandoned. But Charash said that researchers then did not measure muscle strength and did not compare results to those with a placebo. Such studies would not have observed the relatively modest effects seen in the current studies, he said.
“But a small gain for a person who doesn’t have much to work with can be very important,” he noted.
In the study reported today in the journal Neurology, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky of McMaster University in Canada gave 81 patients with muscular dystrophy and other neurological diseases 10 grams of creatine daily for five days and then 5 grams daily for five more days. The researchers measured such factors as hand gripping strength and knee strength and found an average of 10% to 15% improvement.
“The improvements are as encouraging as many of the treatments people are now using for these diseases,” Tarnopolsky said. “Creatine is inexpensive, it’s nontoxic and it has few side effects.”
That study follows another reported in the March issue of Nature Medicine by Dr. M. Flint Beal of Cornell University Medical Center. He was studying mice with a genetic form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
Beal found that mice given creatine in their water at a solution of 1% to 2% lived an average of 26 days longer than those not given the drug, and that their muscles remained healthy longer. That was twice the benefit observed with riluzole, the only drug now approved for treating ALS in humans.
Riluzole, moreover, costs as much as $10,000 per year.
The Muscular Dystrophy Assn. will also fund clinical trials of creatine in ALS patients, Charash said.
Creatine has been popular with professional athletes, such as home run sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, quarterback Troy Aikman and Olympic track medalists Linford Christie and Michael Johnson.
