Hiya
I have had severe night sweats off and on since around 2014. Last night was fine, night before totally soaked. The pattern is severe nightmares, very heavy sweating, and waking, typically around 4am. I am not overheating and don't have any other conditions that might be relevant as far as I know.
At the point the sweats started I was undiagnosed despite an increasing number of annoying and painful diabetic symptoms. HbA1c was probably around 45-46 mmol/mol. I didn't link them with T2 or BG at all until I tried a CGM for a while.
This data showed that the nightmares/sweating coincided with a marked cliff-edge fall in BG to somewhere in the low threes. CGM data also showed that my BG then quickly started to rise and would continue to do so well into the morning, probably as part of dawn phenomenon. There's very little data on this (although see the attached paper), but as shown in the paper it's clear that non-diabetic CGM users have reported the same thing. In my case it may have started because of out of range BG, but I've had normal (sub-40) BG levels for over five years so that is certainly not the current trigger. It's been suggested to me that it may be due to a large insulin dump which might produce this sort of effect. I really don't know.
This research below used non-diabetic subjects to establish a baseline for CGM use - basically to find out "what normal looks like". They seem to have been a bit surprised to find that overnight hypoglycaemic lows were reasonably frequent (even after they'd excluded some data on lows).
Glucose concentrations >140 mg/dL and <70 mg/dL were uncommon overnight, with median percentages of values of 0% (IQR, 0.0 to 1.0) and 0.4% (IQR, 0.0 to 2.5), respectively. Yet, 14% of participants had a hypoglycemic event overnight (Table 3).
Use of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is increasing for insulin-requiring patients with diabetes. Although data on glycemic profiles of healthy, nondiabetic individuals exist for older sensors, assessment of glycemic metrics with new-generation ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Having said that, it still doesn't mean that you can conclude low BG
causes the sweats. Both might be caused by another factor, they may just travel together.
