Mysterious MAOI hypertensive episodes.

A reliable patient experienced several MAOI-associated acute hypertensive episodes that could not be accounted for by indiscretions of diet or contraindicated medications. The sparse literature on such mysterious hypertensive crises reveals them to be uncommon but not unknown. The mechanism is as yet disturbingly unexplained. An incidental finding in this case was that the novel MAOI l-deprenyl did not result in hypertensive crises but, in contrast to conventional MAOIs, was ineffective against panic attacks.