Guanidinoacetic Acid With Creatine Compared With Creatine Alone for Tissue Bioenergetics, Hyperhomocysteinemia and Exercise Performance

University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Sport and Physical Education

Status: Completed

Conditions: Energy Metabolism

Treatments: Dietary Supplement: Creatine; Dietary Supplement: GAA-creatine

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03350282

SSD-01

Details and patient eligibility

About

Co-administration of creatine and guanidinoacetic acid (GAA) has been recently put forward as an advanced dietary strategy to optimize tissue bioenergetics. The investigators hypothesized that creatine-GAA mixture would result in more powerful rise in brain and skeletal muscle creatine, as compared to creatine supplementation alone.

Full description

Targeting energy-demanding tissues in health and disease continues to be a challenging task in human nutrition and biomedicine. Impaired bioenergetics accompanies many different conditions, including cardiometabolic diseases, neurodegenerative disorders or high-intensity exercise, with various dietary interventions developed to restore cellular energy. Creatine is recognized as a beneficial and safe energy-boosting agent in both athletic and clinical environments. However, its effectiveness in specific conditions seems to be fairly restrained due to its limits in transportability and performance. Guanidinoacetic acid (GAA), a metabolic precursor of creatine, appears as a novel energy-enhancing supplement, with GAA being superior to creatine in facilitating creatine concentrations in the human brain and skeletal muscle. This perhaps happens due to GAA interaction with cellular transporters previously dismissed as untargetable carriers by other similar therapeutics. On the other hand, GAA loading remains under scrutiny due to its hyperhomocysteinemia-inducing potential, and possible neurotoxic effects. Co-administration of creatine and GAA has been recently proposed as a better strategy comparing to administration of each compound per se. Besides providing a competitive advantage for enhanced levels of tissue creatine, GAA-creatine mixture might also diminish side effects related to isolated GAA administration. However, no human studies so far evaluated the effects of this mixture. In the present study, the investigators compared the impact of 4-week co-administration of GAA and creatine vs. creatine administration alone on serum biomarkers, exercise performance and tissue bioenergetics in healthy young men.

Enrollment: 14 patients

Sex: Male

Ages: 18 to 45 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• men age 18-45 years
• BMI 18.5-24.9 kg/m2
• physically active (> 150 min per week)
• free of known disease
• must be able to give written informed consent

Exclusion criteria

• serum homocysteine > 15 µmol/L
• use of dietary supplement (> 1 month)

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Crossover Assignment

Masking: Quadruple Blind

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14 participants in 2 patient groups

Mixture GAA-creatine

Experimental group

Description:

Mixture of guanidinoacetic acid and creatine monohydrate

Treatment:

Dietary Supplement: GAA-creatine

Creatine

Active Comparator group

Description:

Creatine monohydrate

Treatment:

Dietary Supplement: Creatine