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The father determines the fertility period of the daughter
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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If a man smokes during his partner's pregnancy, their daughter's menopause begins a year earlier. This is the conclusion reached by scientists from the M&K Health Institute (Japan).
Previous studies have shown that smoking by a woman herself, as well as by her partner, can accelerate the onset of menopause. Now it has been established that the harmful paternal habit affects the reproductive life of daughters more than the tobacco passion of their husbands. Scientists believe that smoking during conception can affect sperm cells or the development of the embryo.
The researchers surveyed more than 1,000 Japanese women who had visited a gynecologist and were going through menopause. They were interested in the following: how old the subjects were, when they started menstruating, when they went through menopause, whether their husbands smoked between these two dates; then the scientists asked the women's parents whether they smoked during pregnancy.
Here's what they found: Three-quarters of fathers smoked while their daughters were in the womb, and three-quarters of women said their husbands smoked before they, the wives, went through menopause. Only a few women in both generations - between 4 and 6 percent - smoked during pregnancy or when they were fertile.
On average, all respondents experienced menopause at age 51, but smokers experienced it 14 months earlier. If a non-smoking woman's husband was a tobacco smoker, her periods stopped five months earlier, and if her father smoked while she was in the womb, menopause began 13 months earlier. However, whether a father smoked or not had no effect on the age at which a girl became a young woman. The researchers were unable to determine how maternal smoking affected the timing of puberty and menopause in their daughters, since the number of smoking mothers was insufficient to draw any conclusions. Scientists are also not sure that paternal smoking affected their daughters at the embryonic stage, rather than after they were born.