Blood Test - Creatine

Change your diet or protein intake recently?

Creatinine?

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Elevated creatinine level signifies impaired kidney function or kidney disease.

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Elevated creatinine levels on a chemistry panel is a result of one of two things: increased production of creatinine, or decreased creatinine filtration from the blood via the kidneys. So your body is either making more than normal, or it is unable to filtrate it through the kidneys enough.

Having a high muscle mass naturally creates more creatinine in the blood. There's nothing wrong with this, because it doesn't mean that your kidney function is bad; it means that your blood levels are high because your body is making more of it.

Having a high creatinine level in blood is also a product of taking creatine supplements. Creatine is broken down eventually into creatinine, which makes its way into the blood and is detected on blood labs. This is again a function of increased production rather than decreased filtration from bad kidneys.

Someone who does not have high muscle mass, and who is not taking a creatine supplement, but who has high creatinine in a lab probably has high creatinine because of too little kidney filtration. In other words, the body is not making more than it should as in the two previous examples, but instead the kidneys just aren't able to filtrate it enough. This scenario would be concerning for kidney disease.

There is nothing wrong with having mildly high creatinine levels in the blood when you are taking creatine supplements. This is expected from a physiological standpoint.

The easiest way to tell if this is something to worry about, or nothing to worry about, is to stop taking creatine for a couple weeks and repeat the lab.