couple of important points to remember
1. Correlation does not equal causation. Jake, if you want to continue in science, this is an important point to keep in mind. Two things may appear to be linked without being dependent on each other. Even if there is some sort of link between the heart problems of this patient and creatine supplements (which there is no proof of in the section that you copied), that does not mean that the creatine caused them. Heart problems could be caused by a defect that was aggravated by increased excersize, started after taking creatine. The patient would then experience them only after taking creatine, but without the supplement being the cause.
2. Sample size is important. One of the cases you showed was from 1998. That is not considered to be 'recent' literature. If you can't get a greater amount of proof in more recent literature, it's a telling sign that the proof isn't there.
3. To the cancer risk part, to be fair, just about everything has been linked to cancer in one study or another. It's all about how you look at it. Again, correlation does not equal causation.
As an aside, having done just a five minute internet search (and as a tip for future science classes- NCBI pubmed is one of the best sources you will ever find for papers) here is the abstract of an article on longer term effects using creatine as a treatment for disease.
Quote:
Few adverse effects of long-term creatine supplementation in a placebo-controlled trial.
Although oral creatine supplementation is very popular among athletes, no prospective placebo-controlled studies on the adverse effects of long-term supplementation have yet been conducted. We performed a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of creatine monohydrate in patients with the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, because of the neuroprotective effects it was shown to have in animal experiments. The purpose of this paper is to compare the adverse effects, and to describe the effects on indirect markers of renal function of long-term creatine supplementation. 175 subjects (age = 57.7 +/- 11.1 y) were randomly assigned to receive creatine monohydrate 10 g daily or placebo during an average period of 310 days. After one month, two months and from then on every fourth month, adverse effects were scored using dichotomous questionnaires, plasma urea concentrations were measured, and urinary creatine and albumin concentrations were determined. No significant differences in the occurrence at any time of adverse effects due to creatine supplementation were found (23 % nausea in the creatine group, vs. 24 % in the placebo group, 19 % gastro-intestinal discomfort in the creatine group, vs. 18 % in the placebo group, 35 % diarrhoea in the creatine group, vs. 24 % in the placebo group). After two months of treatment, oedematous limbs were seen more often in subjects using creatine, probably due to water retention. Severe diarrhoea (n = 2) and severe nausea (n = 1) caused 3 subjects in the creatine group to stop intake of creatine, after which these adverse effects subsided. Long-term supplementation of creatine did not lead to an increase of plasma urea levels (5.69 +/- 1.47 before treatment vs. 5.26 +/- 1.44 at the end of treatment) or to a higher prevalence of micro-albuminuria (5.4 % before treatment vs. 1.8 % at the end of treatment).
|
The effects of creatine are not yet totally known, but there is not enough evidence yet to say that creatine supplements are dangerous.