selegiline is cheap. Rasagiline is available but I suspect cost inflated. However, I don't think either are targeted at depression, esp at the doses available.
I supposed I should have read it more carefully. It refers to phenelzine which is...both. It's nonselective so it's an A and B inhibitor.
How good is it, I cannot say as not a lot of people prescribe it anymore. The problem with it is that a risk of hypertensive crisis, especially in combination with tyramine in aged foods, or inducing an overload in combination w/ any other drug that raises monoamine neurotransmitter levels, i.e. SSRI's etc. It's become kind of a bogeyman. So the original source seems to be trying to fight that particular "meme" in medical education. I'm not about to wade into pubmed regarding how often hypertensive crisis happens in a 60 or 70 year old drug, but there may be a point in that as medical students, we memorize the "quick bites" of some of these things as our time and attention is extremely limited in figuring out what to study for the boards. and if we do want to prescribe it, we have a pharmacist pushing back on the other end of the phone because it has this thing as a big scary Black Box Warning on the drug.
I will say, MAO-B inhibitors (at least those studied in anti-parkinsonian trials and doses) don't seem to do anything. No hypertensive crisis, but we haven't been able to see a huge therapeutic effect either. The psych people dose them at 6 times the parkinsonian dose though...<shrug>
The other potential angle on that post is...this may reflect on some aspect of an unregulated generics market. Aside from phenelzine, I seem to see weird swings in availability and pricing of generics in the past few years.
