Helene Alexanderson

Dr Helene Alexanderson is associate professor and senior adjunct lecturer , PhD, registered physical therapist at Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Since 2022 she is the team leader of the myositis research group at KI.

In 2003 she got her PhD-degree at Karolinska Institutet with her doctoral thesis titled “Exercise and clinical outcome measures in patients with Polymyositis and dermatomyositis”.  In the thesis she developed and validated Functional Index 2, a measure of dynamic muscle function for patients with adult non-IBM IIM. In collaboration with Mayo Clinic, she streamlined this measure and developed Functional Index 3 to be more feasible internationally. Since then, she has continued to combine clinical work with research focusing on clinical and molecular effects of exercise and continued to develop clinical outcome measures to assess muscle endurance in IIM. She is board member of MIHRA and is chair of MIHRA-IMACS Rehabilitation and Exercise Scientific Working Group leading the current project to develop evidence-based consensus exercise guidelines in IIM. She is co-chair of OMERACT Myositis Working Group aiming to develop and validate patient-relevant patient-reported outcome measures for patients with IIM. In these international research collaborations Dr Alexanderson is working closely with patient research partners as equal members of the research group as well as with other health professions such as physicians, occupational therapists, nurses, physiologists, rehabilitation physicians and social workers. At the Karolinska Institutet, she is teaching physical therapy students about IIM and other inflammatory rheumatic diseases. She has published altogether 101 scientific papers on IIM, 71 original publications and 30 review papers. Dr Alexanderson was elected member of TMA Medical Advisory Board, 2014-2019, and reelected for new term in 2022.