By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-05 06:29:31 | Updated at 2025-01-07 02:42:32
1 day ago
A new surgical treatment for Alzheimer’s disease is showing promise in a clinical trial under way in Chinese hospitals.
One doctor taking part in the trial at a hospital in Changsha, Hunan province, says the results so far have been positive.
Dr Tang Juyu, a professor at the Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, said his team had already performed the procedure – known as lymphatic-venous anastomosis, or LVA – on more than 70 patients.
According to Tang, they have seen improvement in about 80 per cent of those patients, though he stressed that was just a preliminary, qualitative observation.
As Tang made his ward rounds last week, the wife of one patient, surnamed Wu, gushed about the changes she had noticed just four days after the experimental operation.
That morning Wu had indicated that he needed to go to the toilet – an urge he had no longer been aware of before the surgery. He was also lifting his head and making eye contact with others, which he was not doing previously.
“I’m really so happy,” she said. “It like I’ve been thrown a lifeline.”
