History
The older MAOI's heyday was mostly between the years 1957 and 1970. The initial popularity of the 'classic' non-selective irreversible MAO inhibitors began to wane due to their serious interactions with sympathomimetic drugs and tyramine-containing foods that could lead to dangerous hypertensive emergencies. As a result, the use by medical practitioners of these older MAOIs declined. When scientists discovered that there are two different MAO enzymes (MAO-A and MAO-B), they developed selective compounds for MAO-B, (for example, selegiline, which is used for Parkinson's disease), to reduce the side-effects and serious interactions. Further improvement occurred with the development of compounds (moclobemide and toloxatone) that not only are selective but cause reversible MAO-A inhibition and a reduction in dietary and drug interactions.
Irreversible MAOIs were the first antidepressants to be discovered, but they fell out of favour with the advent of the discovery of safer antidepressants; these newer antidepressant drug classes have fewer adverse effects, especially the dangerous irreversible MAOI food interaction with tyramine, sometimes referred to as the 'cheese syndrome', which leads to dangerous hypertension. However, reversible MAOIs lack these hypertensive adverse effects. Moclobemide, was the first reversible inhibitor of MAO-A to enter widespread clinical practice; its reversible inhibitory features give it a number of advantages over the older irreversible MAO inhibitors.
Read more about this topic: Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor
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—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)