Dr. Jeremy Slayter’s Early Career Blog
My Early Career Journey
By Dr. Jeremy Slayter, Resident Physician (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation) & MSc Candidate
Researching neuromuscular diseases as a resident physician in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and a Master's student at Dalhousie University has taught me about myself, others, and people with neuromuscular diseases. It’s a journey of learning about science, medicine, and people—and what matters to improve lives. I’ve learned that quality of life emerges from complex interactions between abilities, goals, and a person’s environment.
To better understand quality of life, we must work hard to include lived experience perspectives in our clinical and research tools. My research focuses on bringing together concepts from medicine, psychology, biostatistics and human behaviour to improve and assess clinical measurement techniques. Recently, my work has focused on patient-reported outcome measures of function and quality of life in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA). Most recently, this journey, supported by the NMD4C Collaborative Research Training Award, took me to the University of Calgary to work with Dr. Gordon Jewett and several of the team members at the Canadian Neuromuscular Disease Registry (CNDR), including Drs. Victoria Hodgkinson and Lisa-Marie Langevin.
This collaborative research visit focused on identifying opportunities to advance research capacity in ALS and SMA. Specifically, we aimed to enhance collaboration between the CNDR, the University of Calgary, and Dalhousie University to grow research capacity for patient-oriented research by aligning efforts to improve clinical measurement tools and questionnaires that evaluate different aspects of life, such as mobility, function and community engagement, that are important to people with neuromuscular diseases.
Carefully understanding the impacts of a neuromuscular disease on people is important to detect when a treatment works. If we have better clinical tools available, we can more accurately identify effective treatments and better recognize changes in neuromuscular diseases, ultimately working towards providing better care and improving quality of life. By working together across the country, we can leverage each of our strengths to build and test more effective clinical tools to advance understanding of the lived experiences of persons with neuromuscular diseases.
Visiting Calgary also gave me a chance to meet with other neuromuscular researchers across the country, and explore new parts of Canada, learn about a new city (along with its foods, culture, and sports teams), and visit and photograph (see below) one of Canada’s most famous natural wonders, Banff National Park. Moving forward, I aim to continue working with people with neuromuscular diseases, to continue integrating their lived experiences into clinical research, and to further support their voices to guide researchers toward impactful treatments in neuromuscular diseases.
