Does creatine cause hair loss?

Where the fear started

Search "creatine hair loss" and you'll find years of forum threads warning that the world's most-studied gym supplement will thin your hairline. The claim traces back almost entirely to one paper: a 2009 trial out of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. It has been repeated so often that it now sounds like settled science. It isn't, and a lot has happened since 2009 that most of those threads never mention.

What the 2009 study actually found

Researchers gave 20 college-aged rugby players either creatine or a placebo for three weeks, in a crossover design with a six-week washout in between. During the seven-day loading phase, players took 25 grams of creatine a day. Blood tests showed dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a hormone your body makes from testosterone, rose 56% by day seven and stayed about 40% above baseline through the two-week maintenance phase that followed. The ratio of DHT to testosterone rose too, by roughly a third during loading.

That's a real, statistically significant hormonal shift, and it's the entire foundation of the hair loss claim. But the study had two important gaps: it measured hormones in blood, not hair on heads, and DHT levels stayed within the normal clinical range the whole time. No one in the trial had their scalp examined. Nobody counted hairs. The "hair loss" part of "creatine causes hair loss" was always an inference, not a measurement.

The trial that finally checked people's scalps

That gap stood for sixteen years. It closed in April 2025, when a team publishing in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition ran the first study to actually look at hair, not just hormones. Thirty-eight resistance-trained men took either 5 grams of creatine or a placebo daily for 12 weeks. Researchers measured testosterone and DHT in blood, and separately used a trichogram and imaging system to track hair density, thickness, follicle counts, and the ratio of healthy terminal hairs to thin vellus hairs.

The result: no meaningful difference between groups on any hormone or hair measure. The study's own authors describe it as the first direct evidence against the idea that creatine harms hair follicles. Jose Antonio, an exercise physiologist at Nova Southeastern University and a co-author on that trial, put it plainly to Men's Health: "the current body of evidence does not indicate that creatine causes hair loss or baldness." He also made a point worth remembering whenever a supplement headline cites a p-value: "statistically significant is not the same thing as physiologically meaningful."

What actually causes hair loss

If it isn't creatine, what is? Mostly your genes. Androgenetic alopecia, the technical name for male and female pattern hair loss, is driven by how sensitive your individual hair follicles are to DHT, and that sensitivity is inherited. Research published in PLOS ONE estimates that around 80% of the variance in pattern hair loss comes down to genetics. DHT itself binds to receptors on susceptible follicles and gradually shrinks them, turning thick terminal hairs into short, thin vellus hairs over successive growth cycles. By age 50, up to half of men show some degree of it, according to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, rising to about 80% by 80. None of that requires a supplement to happen. It happens to people who have never touched a protein shaker.

Should you worry

If pattern baldness runs in your family, you were always going to be dealing with DHT sensitivity at some point, creatine or not. Cleveland Clinic dietitian Kate Patton sums up the current evidence simply: "no conclusive evidence suggests that creatine increases testosterone or causes hair loss." If you're still uneasy, that's a reasonable conversation to have with a dermatologist who can look at your actual scalp and family history, rather than a reason to quit a supplement with one of the largest, most consistent safety records in sports nutrition. For the fuller picture, see what creatine actually does in the body.

Our take

One small hormone study from 2009 built an entire internet myth, and it took until 2025 for anyone to actually check whether creatine users were losing hair. They weren't. The DHT bump is real, small, and temporary. Whether it matters for your hairline comes down almost entirely to genes you already had before you opened a tub of creatine.

This is general information, not medical advice. Talk to a clinician before changing anything, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, or managing a condition.