China has banned an unproven Alzheimer’s operation and detained its inventor, but international clinical trials of dcLVA are still going ahead—why?

An expensive and recently banned neck operation for Alzheimer’s disease spread rapidly through China and is now being tested in the US and other countries, despite a lack of randomised evidence to demonstrate its efficacy.Qingping Xie, a microsurgeon and president at Hangzhou Qiushi Hospital in the city of Hangzhou, China, performed the first ever deep cervical lymphatic-venous anastomosis (dcLVA) on a patient with Alzheimer’s disease six years ago after receiving ethical approval from his hospital for the highly experimental procedure. The procedure became popular1 in China and was featured in articles published in Science in 20252 and in Nature in 2026.3But the rapid expansion of the procedure ignited criticism about its lack of standardisation, high price, and potential complications,4 as well as the ethics5 of performing experimental surgery on such vulnerable patients. It was banned6 by Chinese authorities in July 2025 because of a lack of robust clinical evidence to…