Children With Diabetes Face Higher Risks

A newly published Journal of the American Medical Association study finds that individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in childhood are more likely to end up with kidney disease and increased death rates, compared with those diagnosed in adulthood. Researchers studied rates of end stage renal disease among 1856 diabetic participants from the Pima Indian population from 1965 to 2002.

Individuals who had been diagnosed with diabetes during childhood had nearly a five-fold increase in the incidence of end stage renal disease between 25 to 54 years of age, compared to those who had been diagnosed as adults. The death rate was also 3 times higher in participants diagnosed in childhood as in participants without diabetes and 1.4 times as high as those individuals diagnosed as adults. More than half of deaths among those with diabetes resulted from diabetic neuropathy, cardiovascular disease, or infections, regardless of the age at onset.