← The science

Does creatine cause hair loss?

Where the worry started

In 2009, researchers in South Africa gave twenty college-aged rugby players creatine for three weeks — a loading dose for the first week, then a maintenance dose — and tracked their hormones. They reported a rise in dihydrotestosterone, or DHT: up around 56% after the loading week, and still meaningfully above baseline through the maintenance phase.

DHT matters to anyone thinking about hair because it is the hormone involved in androgenetic alopecia — ordinary male and female pattern balding. If you are genetically predisposed, your follicles are sensitive to DHT and they gradually miniaturise. So a study showing creatine raising DHT sounds alarming, and the internet did what the internet does.

What that study did not show

Three things are worth being precise about.

• It never measured hair. No follicle counts, no shedding, no scalp photographs — nobody in the study was assessed for hair loss at all.
• The DHT levels stayed inside the normal reference range. They moved within the band you would find in healthy young men, rather than climbing into a clinically abnormal zone.
• It was twenty people for three weeks. That is a pilot, not a verdict, and small samples in hormone research are notorious for producing findings that vanish on a second look.

Nobody has reproduced it

That is the part that should settle most nerves. Creatine is the most heavily studied supplement in sports nutrition — hundreds of controlled trials, some running for years. If it reliably shifted androgens, that would have shown up repeatedly by now. Later reviews looking specifically at creatine and hormones have not found a consistent effect on testosterone or DHT, and the 2021 position stand from the International Society of Sports Nutrition explicitly lists hair loss among the claims not supported by evidence.

The honest caveat

We are not going to tell you the question has been definitively closed — but it is no longer true that nobody has looked directly. In 2025 a 12-week randomised controlled trial, the first built specifically around this question, gave participants creatine and measured both their DHT and their visible hair density. It found no significant change in either.

It was still a small study — 38 people — and it did not screen for who was genetically predisposed to balding, so it does not entirely close the door for someone already losing hair to their genes. But it moves the evidence in the same direction as everything else: the study everyone cites did not measure hair, has not been replicated, and now sits against a body of research — including a trial designed to catch exactly this effect — in which it simply does not appear.

If you are already losing hair, the overwhelmingly likely cause is genetics and age, and creatine is not the lever worth pulling. If you are anxious about it regardless, that is a reasonable thing to raise with a GP or dermatologist — and stopping creatine for a few months costs you nothing but the strength benefit.

The takeaway

One small study measured a hormone and found a change within the normal range. The years of research since — including a trial built to look for it — have not confirmed hair loss, and no study has documented creatine causing hair to fall out. On the evidence available, this is a myth that has outlived its source.