ELFE

Description

ELFE is the first French national birth cohort. Its objective is to study determinants of the development, health and socialization of children from birth to adulthood through a multidisciplinary approach. A total of 18329 children were recruited at birth in a random sample of maternity units in metropolitan France during 25 selected days of 2011 spread over the year. Follow-up in the first 10 years consisted of telephone interviews of both parents of the child and an on-line self-questionnaires at age 14 years, two home visit at age 3.5 and 10 years; questionnaires to the child’s physician at age 2 years and at age 12 years, the child’s nursery school doctor at age 3 to 4 years, and the child’s nursery schoolteacher at age 4 years. The main categories of data collected concern: sociodemographic characteristics; family life; parental health, behaviour and life values; child development and health; child school performance, behaviour, and socialization; day care and school; and childhood environmental exposures.

General Design

Type: Cohort study
Cohort type: Population cohort, Birth cohort
Data collection type: Retrospective, Prospective
Design: Longitudinal
Start/End data collection: 2011 until 2021
Design paper: Cohort Profile: The French national cohort of children (ELFE): birth to 5 years.

Population

Continents: Europe
Countries: France
Number of participants: 18329

Organisations

Lead organisations

Inserm (INSERM)
France
https://www.inserm.fr

Contributors

Marie Aline Charlesmarie-aline.charles@inserm.fr
Héctor Raúl Címbaro Canellaraul.cimbaro-canella@ined.fr
Principal Investigator, Primary contact
Stephanie VandentorrenStephanie.VANDENTORREN@santepubliquefrance.fr
Alternative contact

Available Data & Samples

Data categories

Omics
- Genomics
- Epigenomics
- Transcriptomics
- Metagenomics / Microbiome

Areas of information

Socio-demographic and economic characteristics
- Socio-economic capital
- Age/birthdate
- Sex/gender
- Ethnicity, race and religion
- Labour force and retirement
  - Parental occupation
Lifestyle and behaviours
- Tobacco
- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Nutrition
- Breastfeeding
- Physical activity
- Sleep
Birth, pregnancy and reproductive health history
- Pregnancy, delivery and birth
- Birth outcomes
- Other reproductive health-related information
Family Health History
- Parental diseases
Cognition, personality and psychological measures and assessments
- Psychological distress and emotions
Social environment and relationships
- Other social environment characteristics
Physical environment
- Geocodes for residential address
- Chemical exposure
  - Chemicals
    - Persistent organic pollutants
    - Metals & elements
    - Other chemicals
- Natural environment
- Air pollution (outdoor)
- Air pollution (indoor)
- Meteorology

Data dictionaries

Tables

Tables and their description

Name	Description
No results for current selection

Variables

Variables and their description

Filter by table

Filter by variable

Variable	Table
No results for current selection

Subpopulations

List of subpopulations for this resource

Name	Description	Number of participants
No results for current selection

Collection events

List of collection events defined for this resource

Name	Description	Participants	Start end year
No results for current selection

Networks

Part of networks

INTEGRATE Large Medical Cohorts
The INTEGRATE-LMedC consortium will develop a new concept to guide and support decision-making for the next-generation research infrastructure (RI) to facilitate efficient utilization and harmonization of large medical cohorts (LMedC), and to accelerate scientific and medical breakthroughs in Europe and beyond.
Website Network details Catalogue
The LifeCycle Project
A Europe-wide network of cohort studies started in early life Cohort studies started from pregnancy or childhood give the unique opportunity to relate early-life stressors with variation in development, health and disease throughout the life course. Moreover, advanced analytical approaches used in observational studies can help identify causality and potential for early-life interventions on factors that cannot be easily studied in experimental settings. These factors include socioeconomic circumstances, migration, urban environment as well as lifestyle-related determinants and will be given particular focus in our project. We will set up a European pregnancy and childhood cohort, the EU Child Cohort Network, which brings together extensive existing data from more than 250,000 European children and their parents. These cohorts enable studies in multiple generations because of their detailed phenotyping of both parents and children. The network will bring together existing successful multidisciplinary cohort studies, which all started before or during pregnancy or in childhood. Together, they span the full life course and contain detailed phenotypical information as well as biological samples. The EU Child Cohort Network will optimize exploitation of more than 40 available cohort resources in Europe and will enable innovative research on identification of novel markers of early-life stressors related to health trajectories throughout the full life cycle. Although LifeCycle partners and their cohorts have taken the initiative for this unique collaboration, the network is open to other partners with population-based cohorts started in early life, specifically those from Eastern and Southern Europe. To ensure that this will be a Europe-wide, open and sustainable network, which exceeds the LifeCycle Project duration, we will introduce a data sharing platform taking account of ethical, legal and societal implications, we will organize yearly meetings open to all European pregnancy and child cohort researchers and we will start a fellowship programme for exchange between these European cohorts.
Website Network details Catalogue
LongITools Health & Environment Dynamics
LongITools is a European research project studying the interactions between the environment, lifestyle and health in determining the risks of chronic cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
Website Network details Catalogue
Global Exposome Cohorts
The Global Exposome Cohort Catalogue is an international registry, based on the FAIR principle, of exposome cohorts with worldwide coverage. The objective is to generate a shared, public space for findability/discovery of cohorts with datasets that are relevant for the exposome field (i.e., that can contribute to answering exposome-related research questions), containing source metadata for each listed resource. We define a cohort as: a longitudinal population (birth, mother-child, adolescent, adult, or multi-generational) in which individual-level data are collected on health outcomes and/or exposures of interest. The Global Exposome Cohort Catalogue hosts metadata for each cohort, focusing on elements such as (Type of Cohort, Timing and duration of data collection, Exposure domains covered [e.g., chemical, urban, lifestyle, social], Geographical scope, Contact information for dataset access, Link to external website or data repository).
Network details Catalogue

Publications

Cohort Profile: The French national cohort of children (ELFE): birth to 5 years.

Access conditions

- Submission of the project proposal to the cohort PI (Marie-Aline Charles) - Approval of the project by Elfe data access committee (takes 2 weeks) - Signature of a data access agreement - Data made available for analysis by Lucinda (credentials will be sent to the person requesting access to the data)

Data access conditions: health or medical or biomedical research
Release type: Continuous
Linkage options: yes

Funding & Acknowledgements

Funding: The Ministries of the Environment, Health and Research provided initial funding for the ELFE cohort. The funding for the first 5 years of childhood follow-up was obtained from the national ‘Investment for the Future’ research funding program for a joint project bringing together the ELFE and Epipage 2 cohorts.

Documentation

Access to ELFE data