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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

Also looks to be a significant MAOI from the data table at the end. MAOIs are known to be antidepressants; I'm not sure if they addressed this in the paper as a confounding factor.

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I wouldn't exactly call this an antagonistic behaviour. If it can provide some immediate relief by virtue of being an MAOI antidepressant, and promote the kind of brain plasticity to help people make better pathways, isn't that actually good?

If you meant "it might be that it helped but not because of neuroplasticity effects" you could be right. But assuming they have good basis to think it does, I don't see being an MAOI as a confounding effect in outcome.

MAOIs can be dangerous too, certain combinations with strong MAOIs can be problematic. Foods containing tyramime and many drugs don't play nicely with MAOIs.

There are a number of researchers now who believe that the risk of MAOIs is overblown, for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30255284/

That's not what your link says. The claim there is that MAOIs are less dangerous today than in the past because the tyramine content of food has been significantly reduced. In particular cheese, which it says was the only food associated with fatalities due to hypertension, now presents much less of a danger than before.

There are newer classes of of MAOIs called Reversible Selective MAOIs (Moclobemide) that do not have this problem with tyramine containing food.

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