The father's fertility period depends on the father
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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If a man smokes during pregnancy his partner, menopause at their daughter begins a year earlier. This conclusion was drawn by scientists from the M & K Health Institute (Japan).
Previous work has shown that smoking a woman herself, like her partner, can accelerate the onset of menopause. And now it is also established that a 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 an embryo.
Researchers interviewed more than a thousand Japanese women who visited the gynecologist and stayed in the climacteric period. They were interested in the following: how many years the subjects, when they started menstruating, when menopause came, did their husbands smoke between these two dates; then the scientists learned from the parents of these women whether they smoked during pregnancy.
And that's what turned out: three quarters of fathers were smoking when their daughters were in the mother's womb, and three quarters of the women said that their husbands were smoking before their wives started menopause. Only a few women in both generations - from 4 to 6% - smoked themselves during pregnancy or during the period when they were fertile.
On average, all the respondents had menopause at 51, but smokers had it earlier for 14 months. If the husband was a fan of a non-smoking woman, menstruation stopped at her five months earlier, and if her father smoked while she was in the womb, menopause started 13 months earlier. However, the smoking or non-smoking of the father did not affect the age at which the girl became a girl. How the smoking of mothers affects the time of onset of puberty and menopause in daughters, the researchers were unable to find out, since the number of smoking mothers was insufficient for any conclusions. Scientists are not sure that smoking of fathers influenced daughters at the stage of embryonic development, and not after their birth.