Research

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Oral administration of deuterated creatine (D3-creatine) allows for the accurate estimation of total body skeletal muscle mass via urine D3-creatinine enrichment, providing a method with less bias than DXA or 24-hour urine creatinine excretion.

To accurately measure total skeletal muscle mass, the D3-creatine dilution method is superior to DXA and standard urine creatinine tests. It involves taking a single oral dose of deuterated creatine and collecting urine for 5 days to measure isotopic enrichment. This method correlates strongly with MRI (r=0.868) and avoids the overestimation errors of DXA caused by body water fluctuations. It is currently a research tool, not a standard clinical test.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
The dilution of an oral D3-creatine dose determined by urine D3-creatinine enrichment provides an estimate of total body muscle mass strongly correlated with estimates from serial MRI with less bias than total lean body mass assessment by DXA.
Richard V. Clark et al. · Journal of Applied Physiology · 2014

Why this rating

Validated in a controlled clinical study (n=35) with strong correlation (r=0.868) against MRI, the gold standard, though it is a pilot/validation study rather than a large-scale epidemiological trial.

Source

Total body skeletal muscle mass: estimation by creatine (<i>methyl</i>-d<sub>3</sub>) dilution in humans

Richard V. Clark et al. · Journal of Applied Physiology · 2014

DOI 10.1152/japplphysiol.00045.2014

cross_sectional · n=35Cited 174×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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