Girls who drink a lot of sugary drinks are likely to start their periods early, researchers say today.
The effect is regardless of whether girls put on weight because of consuming the drinks, researchers say.
This may have implications for the risk of breast cancer in later life, say the researchers, led by Dr Karin Michels, of Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
Her team used information on 5,583 girls aged nine to 14 years between 1996 and 2001.
This showed that consuming more than one and half sugary drinks a day was linked to periods starting 2.7 months earlier, compared with drinking two or fewer sugary drinks a week.
Analysis suggests that this effect was not linked to body mass index, height, total food intake, or other factors such as physical activity. Full details of the study are published in the journal Human Reproduction.
The team say this is the first study to look at the link.
"Our study adds to increasing concern about the wide-spread consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks among children and adolescents in the USA and elsewhere," says Dr Michels.
"The main concern is about childhood obesity, but our study suggests that age of first menstruation occurred earlier, independently of body mass index, among girls with the highest consumption of drinks sweetened with added sugar. These findings are important in the context of earlier puberty onset among girls, which has been observed in developed countries and for which the reason is largely unknown."
She adds that each one-year decrease in age at first period is estimated to raise breast cancer risk by 5%.
"The public health significance of sugary drink consumption at age at menarche, and possibly breast cancer, should not be over-looked, since, unlike most other predictors of menarche, it can be modified," the team concludes.
Carwile, J. L. et al. Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and age at menarche in a prospective study of US girls. Human Reproduction 28 January 2015 doi:10.1093/humrep/deu349
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