Current psychiatric diagnoses, although heritable, have not been clearly mapped onto distinct underlying pathogenic processes. The same symptoms often occur in multiple disorders, and a substantial proportion of both genetic and environmental risk factors are shared across disorders. However, the relationship between shared symptoms and shared genetic liability is still poorly understood.

Well-characterised, cross-disorder samples are needed to investigate this matter, but few currently exist. Our aim is to develop procedures to purposely curate and aggregate genotypic and phenotypic data in psychiatric research.

As part of the Cardiff MRC Mental Health Data Pathfinder initiative, we have curated and harmonised phenotypic and genetic information from 15 studies to create a new data repository, DRAGON-Data. To date, DRAGON-Data includes over 45 000 individuals: adults and children with neurodevelopmental or psychiatric diagnoses, affected probands within collected families and individuals who carry a known neurodevelopmental risk copy number variant.

We have processed the available phenotype information to derive core variables that can be reliably analysed across groups. In addition, all data-sets with genotype information have undergone rigorous quality control, imputation, copy number variant calling and polygenic score generation.

DRAGON-Data combines genetic and non-genetic information, and is available as a resource for research across traditional psychiatric diagnostic categories. Algorithms and pipelines used for data harmonisation are currently publicly available for the scientific community, and an appropriate data-sharing protocol will be developed as part of ongoing projects (DATAMIND) in partnership with Health Data Research UK.

The past decade has seen the development of services for adults presenting with symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the UK. Compared with children, little is known about the phenotypic and genetic characteristics of these patients.

This e-cohort study aimed to examine the phenotypic and genetic characteristics of a clinically presenting sample of adults diagnosed with ASD by specialist services.

Individuals diagnosed with ASD as adults were recruited by the National Centre for Mental Health and completed self-report questionnaires, interviews and provided DNA; 105 eligible individuals were matched to 76 healthy controls. We investigated demographics, social history and comorbid psychiatric and physical disorders. Samples were genotyped, copy number variants (CNVs) were called and polygenic risk scores were calculated.

Of individuals with ASD, 89.5% had at least one comorbid psychiatric diagnosis, with depression (62.9%) and anxiety (55.2%) being the most common. The ASD group experienced more neurological comorbidities than controls, particularly migraine headache. They were less likely to have married or be in work, and had more alcohol-related problems. There was a significantly higher load of autism common genetic variants in the adult ASD group compared with controls, but there was no difference in the rate of rare CNVs.

This study provides important information about psychiatric comorbidity in adult ASD, which may inform clinical practice and patient counselling. It also suggests that the polygenic load of common ASD-associated variants may be important in conferring risk within the non-intellectually disabled population of adults with ASD.

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