Type I diabetes or juvenile diabetes delays kidney disease onset

Getting juvenile diabetes is definitely not good news but there is a silver lining. Those children seem to be much less likely than children with later onset to develop kidney failure in adulthood.

This has been reported in a Sweden report in the medical journal Diabetes Care.

Dr. Maria Svensson, of Umea University Hospital, and colleagues conducted a population study and used data from two nationwide registers, which include 12,032 cases of childhood onset of type 1 diabetes, to examine the cumulative occurrence of kidney failure caused by diabetes. After a maximum follow-up of 27 years, the researchers found that 33 (0.7 percent) of 4414 patients who had had diabetes for more than 15 years developed diabetes-related end-stage renal disease (ESRD), which requires dialysis or a kidney transplant.

"No patients with onset of diabetes before 5 years of age had developed ESRD," said the researchers.