Matthias Auer receives Early Career Award for Scientists from DGE

At the Annual Congress of the Section Applied Endocrinology of the German Society of Endocrinology (DGE) in Frankfurt, Matthias Auer from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry receives this year’s award for early career scientists worth 2000 € for his clinical research on sex hormones.

Matthias Auer studied medicine in Mannheim and Heidelberg. In May 2011 he moved to Munich to work in the research group Clinical Neuroendocrinology at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. Alongside his research, he is training to become a specialist in internal medicine / endocrinology.

His scientific interest lies in the effects of sex hormones on mental health and metabolism. Matthias Auer has been awarded this year’s early career scientist’s award for his research into the effects of cross-sex hormone treatment on the metabolism of patients with gender dysphoria. These are patients who don’t identify themselves according to their genetically determined gender.

Matthias Auer studied more than 200 different metabolites in blood taken from patients at baseline and following one year of treatment. He showed that the male sex steroid testosterone as well as the female sex steroid estradiol exerted similar effects in both sexes in some metabolic circuits while in other circuits opposing effects were observed.

“We hope to gain a deeper understanding of how sex steroids influence metabolism in general,” concludes Matthias Auer. “Our results might help to explain why these patients have an increased cardiovascular risk during cross-sex hormone treatment despite favorable changes in classic cardiovascular risk factors such as blood lipids or blood pressure.”

In a larger, long-term study the scientists now want to assess whether the findings of this study may be predictive for any cardiovascular event during cross-sex hormone treatment in the long-run.

MA/AN