The guide

Creatine and hair loss: the pros, the cons and what to do

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 20266 sources

There’s no good evidence that creatine causes hair loss. The worry comes from a 2009 study of 20 rugby players in which a hormone linked to balding, DHT, went up, and nobody looked at their hair. In 2025, the first trial to measure hair gave 45 men 5 g a day or a placebo for 12 weeks and found no difference in hair or in DHT. The gaps are real, though, and there’s a simple way to cover them if hair loss runs in your family.

Search for creatine and you’ll find hair loss in the suggestions, forum threads full of guys who started creatine and noticed their hairline, and videos with titles like “I quit creatine to save my hair”. It sounds plausible because there’s a hormone in the middle of it. And hair loss is common and often runs in families, so plenty of people will notice it in the same years they start lifting and taking creatine, whatever the cause.

Why a hormone started the worry

DHT, or dihydrotestosterone, is made from testosterone by an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. In men whose hair follicles are sensitive to it, DHT binds to them and makes them shrink, which over years is how male pattern hair loss happens (Antonio 2021). So if something raised DHT a lot for a long time, it could in theory speed up hair loss in people who are prone to it.

The 2009 study

In 2009, researchers gave college rugby players creatine and a placebo in turn, each for three weeks. On creatine they took 25 g a day for seven days, a loading phase, then 5 g a day for 14 days, with glucose. Testosterone didn’t change. DHT rose 56% after the loading week and was still 40% above where it started at day 21.

Look at the numbers, though. On creatine, DHT went from 0.98 to 1.53 nmol/L after loading and 1.38 at day 21. On placebo it drifted down, from 1.26 to 1.06. Every value, in both groups, was inside the normal range for adult men of 0.8 to 3.5. The creatine group also happened to start 23% lower than the placebo group, which makes the rise look bigger. And the study never measured hair at all. Nobody has repeated the result since.

It’s like a smoke alarm that chirped once in 2009 while nobody went to look for a fire. In 2025 someone finally checked.

The 2025 trial that measured hair

In 2025, a team led by M. Lak recruited 45 men aged 18 to 40 who lifted weights, and gave them 5 g of creatine monohydrate or 5 g of a carbohydrate placebo (maltodextrin) every day for 12 weeks. 38 finished. Before and after, they measured testosterone, free testosterone and DHT, and they measured hair two ways, with a trichogram that counts hairs and their growth phase, and with FotoFinder imaging for hair density, follicle groups and thickness.

Nothing differed between the groups. DHT, the DHT to testosterone ratio, hair count, density, the share of growing hairs and hair thickness all came out the same on creatine and placebo. Creatinine and the kidney score didn’t change, and nobody in either group reported side effects. The authors called it strong evidence against the claim.

The same 2021 review that traced the myth to the 2009 study counted 12 other studies of creatine and testosterone, at 3 to 25 g a day for 6 days to 12 weeks. Ten found no change, two found small ones, and the five that measured free testosterone, which the body turns into DHT, found no rise (Antonio 2021).

What the trial doesn’t cover

The 2025 trial was men only, for 12 weeks, at 5 g a day with no loading, and the researchers didn’t record family history of hair loss. They measured hormones in blood, not in the scalp. So nobody has tested creatine in women’s hair, in men who are already losing hair, during a loading week like the one in the 2009 study, or over years. The authors point out that men whose fathers lost their hair are about twice as likely to lose theirs, which is exactly the group people worry about.

The pros and the cons

We think the balance is clear. The case for creatine is built on dozens of trials, and the case against it for hair rests on one hormone result that was never tied to a single lost hair. If you’re prone to hair loss, the cautious version below costs you almost nothing.