Thread thinner than hair and 3 hours under the microscope: in Tomsk won Alzheimer

In Siberia, something has been done that no one in Russia has tried before: microsurgeons from Tomsk operated on a patient with Alzheimer's disease - and the first results exceeded all expectations. The 78-year-old woman, who has already stopped recognizing loved ones, remembered her daughter and granddaughter after the operation.

The three-hour operation under the microscope was the country's first attempt to treat Alzheimer's with surgery. Microsurgeon Andrey Baitinger led the intervention - he calls the incident a historical moment for Russian medicine.

"As soon as the patient woke up after anesthesia, she immediately recognized not only her daughter, but also her granddaughter - and she had not recognized her for four years," Bytinger said.

Alzheimer's disease is the main culprit of dementia. The brain is gradually destroyed due to the accumulation of toxic proteins, a person loses memory, ceases to navigate in space and as a result can not recognize even those who are nearby. There is no cure to stop this process yet.

The idea of a surgical approach was born only about three years ago. The first doctors began to master it in Asia, as well as in Mexico and South Africa. Tomsk surgeons went to master classes with their Chinese and Korean colleagues, studied their experience and developed their own surgery plan.

The essence of the method is deep cervical lymphatic bypass surgery. To put it simply, surgeons have created a kind of “garbage conduit” that helps the brain more efficiently remove toxic fluid. This is supposed to slow down neurodegeneration.

The patient was carefully selected for the experiment, together with a team of neurologists led by Professor Natalia Zhukova. The choice fell on the 78-year-old resident of Tomsk, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for about six years. In recent months, the disease began to progress rapidly, and the family of the pensioner did not hesitate to agree to the experiment.

The Institute purchased special equipment for visualization of the lymphatic system. On the operating table, Bytinger, together with a young colleague Yuri Magai, for several hours sewed the smallest vessels with lymphatic ducts by hand - threads that are several times thinner than a human hair. The shunt was installed successfully, and it worked.

Doctors will monitor the patient’s condition throughout the year. Only after a series of clinical examinations will it be possible to confidently talk about the effectiveness of the technique. But now the result looks like a real breakthrough in the fight against the disease, which for many years was considered a sentence.