The Weibo topic "Alzheimer's disease can be treated with surgery" has become a hot search topic. According to media reports, the Lugang Campus of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University recently successfully treated a 78-year-old patient.Grandma Qu, a patient with Alzheimer's disease, underwent "deep cervical lymphatic venous anastomosis".One week after the operation, Grandma Qu was able to recognize her family members.
As a complex disease of gradual decline of brain function, the specific triggering factors of Alzheimer's disease have not yet been fully understood. Existing research shows that the abnormal accumulation of β-amyloid plaques and the tangle of tau protein are closely related to the disease. In recent years, scientific research has further revealed that intracerebral lymphatic reflux disorders can lead to abnormal accumulation of β-amyloid protein, which in turn disrupts the transmission of information between neurons and promotes the decline of brain function.
Since the cervical lymphatic system is connected to the brain's lymphatic system, macromolecular proteins accumulated in the brain can be effectively eliminated by accelerating cervical lymphatic drainage, which provides a new mechanism for surgical treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Before this operation, the patient was already in the stage of moderate to severe cognitive decline after multidisciplinary evaluation, manifesting symptoms such as severe restlessness, confused speech, sleep disturbances, and dozens of times of urination at night, requiring 24-hour care from his children.
Through a minimally invasive 3-cm incision on both sides, the doctor used a fluorescence microscope with a magnification of 40 times to carefully explore under fluorescence imaging navigation, and successfully found blocked lymphatic vessels with a diameter of only 0.1 mm and lymph nodes with a diameter of 3 mm. Subsequently, ultra-microscopic surgery was used to anastomose the hair-thin bilateral lymphatic vessels to the deep jugular veins one by one to ensure that the anastomotic lumen was unobstructed and to achieve rapid drainage of lymph fluid in the brain. The operation lasted more than 5 hours, and the patient only had 5 ml of bleeding after the operation.
On the first day after the operation, the patient can walk on the ground, and the sutures will be removed a week later. Currently, this operation is only performed in some hospitals across the country. Our hospital has successfully performed two cases with remarkable therapeutic effects.This innovative surgery provides a new treatment avenue for Alzheimer's disease patients and will bring a new dawn to more patients with Alzheimer's disease and their families.
Experts who performed the operation said that the cost of the operation was less than 20,000 yuan, but it has not yet been carried out in batches.