Dr. Seryan Atasoy is the winner of the Elsevier/EAPM Young Investigator Award 2023

Dr. Seryan Atasoy

Summary of the award-winning work:

Despite the clinical significance and prevalence of high somatic symptoms, the long-term trajectory of somatic symptoms and its determinants in the general population remain poorly understood. To this end, we aimed to identify community-dwelling men and women with varying levels of somatic symptoms and track the extent to which these symptoms remain stable over a 10-year observation period, followed by an analysis of the potential risk factors associated with increasing somatic symptoms over time. The results indicated that the reporting of somatic symptoms is a moderately stable attribute in the general population, whereby most participants report comparable levels of somatic symptoms over time and extreme shifts between low to high or moderate to very high symptom counts are rare. Furthermore, generalized estimating equations revealed that the baseline somatic symptom score was the largest predictor of the follow-up somatic symptom score, followed by sociodemographic and psychosocial risk factors. Most importantly, our findings remained significant even following adjustment for a comprehensive set of risk factors, including older age, lifestyle risk factors and multiple disease conditions.

See article: “Stability and predictors of somatic symptoms in men and women over 10 years: A real-world perspective from the prospective MONICA/KORA study”, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Volume 155, April 2022, 110761


Dr. Atasoy will give a lecture on “Stability and predictors of somatic symptoms in men and women over 10 years: A real-world perspective.” at the Award Ceremony of the EAPM Conference in Wroclaw on Saturday, June 17.


Seryan Atasoy, PhD (Technical University of Munich & University of Gießen and Marburg, Munich, Germany):

Dr. Seryan Atasoy studied psychology at the University of Ottawa (Canada) and University of Southampton (England) from 2009 to 2014. She completed her PhD at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Medical Research – Epidemiology and Public Health in 2019 with ‘summa cum laude’. Her research focused on the effect of mental health risk factors on the onset of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes in the general population. Since 2019, she has continued to conduct post-doctoral research in the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at rechts der Isar Hospital, Technical University of Munich (lead by Prof. Dr. med. Peter Henningsen) and University of Gießen and Marburg (lead by Prof. Dr. med. Johannes Kruse). Her research focusses on the long-term effects of somatic symptoms and mental health risk factors on health and longevity. Dr. Atasoy also works as a psychologist at the rechts der Isar Hospital in Munich.