Improving brain creatine uptake by Klotho protein stimulation: can diet hit the big time?

Abstract

Creatine plays a pivotal role in cellular bioenergetics, acting as a temporal and spatial energy buffer in cells with high and fluctuating energy requirements (1). Jeopardizing delicate creatine homeostasis can be detrimental to many energy-demanding tissues, including the brain. For instance, cerebral creatine hypometabolism accompanies various neurological conditions, including a number of developmental disorders (2, 3), neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular diseases (4, 5), and brain cancer (6). A reduced creatine availability in the brain has been thus recognized as an apposite therapeutic target, and supplying exogenous creatine to compensate for a disease-driven shortfall emerged as a first possible approach. However, early success in animal models of neurological diseases was not corroborated in human trials, with the use of creatine supplementation proved largely disappointing in clinical studies with a number of symptomatic neurological disorders [for a detailed review, see (7)]. A meager delivery of creatine to the brain could be partly due to a low activity/density of creatine transporter (CT1 or SLC6A8), a transmembrane sodium- and chloride-dependent protein that mediates creatine uptake into the target cells (8). For that reason, the upregulation of CT1 function has been identified as an innovative course of action to facilitate creatine uptake, with several exotic agents and routes were cataloged so far, including glucocorticoid-regulated kinases, mammalian target of rapamycin, ammonia, and Klotho protein (9).