The video opens with a man in his 80s slumped in a hospital bed, his face hollow as he scrunches his eyes. A jump cut advances the scene three days: the man is alert now, words gathering as he identifies his son. Six months later, he is pictured sitting upright, engaged in conversation. At eight months, the man walks briskly down a hospital corridor and recites a near-century-old Maoist military anthem from memory.
The footage records the recovery of a man who, in September 2020, became the first person in the world to undergo a surgery known as deep cervical lymphatic-venous anastomosis (dcLVA) to treat Alzheimer's disease. The procedure involves connecting tiny lymphatic vessels in the neck — part of the drainage system that carries waste away from the brain — to nearby veins, creating a route that, in theory, allows fluid and waste proteins to flow more easily into the bloodstream.
The treatment was first reported in 2022 by microsurgeon Qingping Xie, president of the Qiushi Hospital in Hangzhou, China. It drew little notice until Wei Chen, a lymphatic microsurgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, began showing the footage at surgical meetings worldwide the following year. "A lot of jaws dropped," Chen recalls — and a frenzy followed. Hundreds of Chinese hospitals began offering the experimental procedure, propelled by viral testimonial videos on Douyin and WeChat. Thousands of patients paid more than 200,000 yuan (US$30,000) for a chance of recovery.
The rapid adoption in the absence of hard evidence prompted Chinese regulators to intervene last year, restricting the procedure to formalized clinical research settings. Xie, the pioneer of the technique, has been in detention since September for undisclosed reasons.
The rationale rests on a decade of discoveries about the brain's hidden plumbing: in 2012, neuroscientists described the glymphatic system, fluid-filled channels that flush waste from brain tissue, and in 2015 a team led by Jonathan Kipnis identified lymphatic vessels in the brain's protective membranes. If clogs in that drainage contribute to neurodegeneration, Xie reasoned, improving outflow in the neck might help.
The evidence base so far consists mainly of small, single-site Chinese studies. The largest, involving more than 100 people with severe Alzheimer's at a hospital in Zunyi, found modest average improvements in cognitive scores alongside declines in amyloid-β and tau levels in cerebrospinal fluid. MRI scans hint at increased connectivity in the brain's default mode network. But there are no randomized controlled trials, and clinicians anecdotally report that most patients backslide within a year.
Now controlled studies are getting under way around the world — including a 15-person U.S. study and a trial in South Korea — and the scientific community remains divided. "The concept is scientifically valid and biologically plausible," says lymphatics researcher Young-Kwon Hong, but he worries the excitement has outpaced the evidence. Kipnis compares the surgery to a road detour that reroutes traffic without fixing the underlying jam: "The system will get clogged again and again." For families watching a loved one disappear into severe dementia, however, even a year of improvement could be a miracle.
