Understanding Aging in Bipolar Disorder by Integrating Archival Clinical Research Datasets

•Research question: what is a practical and efficient approach to pool/integrate clinical research study data focused on aging and bipolar disorder?•This report describes an initial effort to create an integrated OABD database using the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health Data Archive (NDA), the Aging & Geriatric Experiments in Bipolar Disorder Database (AGE-BD). Goals were to: 1) combine data from 3 U.S. BD studies that included overlapping data elements, 2) investigate research questions related to aims of the original studies, and 3) take an important first step toward combining existing datasets relevant to aging and BD.•Integrated datasets represent an opportunity to better understand how aging may impact the presentation and evolution of chronic mental health disorders across the life-span.