Etude Epidémiologique des Enfants de femmes de l'Education Nationale

The E4N project is based on a pre-existing large prospective cohort of 98,995 French women (E3N or EPIC-France) recruited in 1990 and originally designed to study nutritional and hormonal factors in relation to cancer, breast cancer in particular. In 2011, the E4N project was conceived to: 1) ensure the continuing follow-up of the E3N cohort to extend its use beyond the original research outcomes and themes and 2) expand    the E3N cohort to the spouses, children and grand-children of the E3N women establishing a multigenerational cohort that would allow transgenerational studies and new approaches to assess exposures and evaluate their impact on health.

The objectives are:

• To study the aetiology and the evolution of major chronic diseases
• To study chronic diseases in men
• To study exposures and risk factors for chronic diseases in younger age groups
• To investigate the familial aggregation of exposures and traits
• To assess potential transgenerational effects on health
• To test and adopt novel tools and approaches to assess exposures and study the epidemiology of chronic diseases (e.g. connected objects and e-epidemiology, omic  technologies etc.)

The E3N-E4N family cohort will bring together more than 20,000 families totaling 200,000 people from three generations. E3N has followed 98,995 women since 1990 and E4N 17,886 E3N women's partners since 2015. The recruitment of children is ongoing (20,579 have been recruited to date) and the recruitment of grandchildren will commence after completion of the recruitment of the second generation. An extensive database with data from active monitoring and from the collection of medical, epidemiological and imaging data is integrated with a large biobank (blood and saliva samples).

In 2022, all existing E3N-E4N biological samples have been centralized in the biobanking facility of the CEPH as part of the BioCF project.

More than 1000 publications have been published on E3N-E4N alone or in collaboration with other cohorts.