Children who get obesity-related diabetes face a much higher risk of kidney failure and death by middle age than people who develop diabetes as adults, a study suggests. The research, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, lends support to warnings obesity-related ills are on the verge of shortening the average life span in the United States. The study involved Pima Indians in Arizona. Of the 1,865 participants with Type 2 diabetes, 96 developed it in childhood. During at least 15 years of follow-up, 15 of them, or 16 percent, developed end-stage kidney failure or died from diabetic kidney disease by age 55. That compared with 133, or 8 percent, of those who developed diabetes after age 20.