Hypo headaches

[Ladyblue74]

I've been working really hard at getting my numbers down to the extent that I'm getting 4am hypos - 3mmol - fortunately a headache wakes me up but then stays with me for several hours! Is this something normal? Unfortunately I'm about a 1000 miles from my diabetic nurse atm!

 

[Antje77]

I've been working really hard at getting my numbers down to the extent that I'm getting 4am hypos - 3mmol - fortunately a headache wakes me up but then stays with me for several hours! Is this something normal? Unfortunately I'm about a 1000 miles from my diabetic nurse atm!

What medication are you on for your diabetes?

 

[Captain_Sensible]

I've been working really hard at getting my numbers down to the extent that I'm getting 4am hypos - 3mmol - fortunately a headache wakes me up but then stays with me for several hours! Is this something normal? Unfortunately I'm about a 1000 miles from my diabetic nurse atm!

Hi Ladyblue. Hypos or low blood sugar is very common if you take insulin injections. Ive had type 1 for 65 years and like you I get lows mostly at 3-4am in the morning. We all want to get our bloods down & get a good HbA1c for the special but really if you are in the 7 to 7.5 mmols average HbA1c then you are doing fine. Maybe reduce your insulin by a couple of units ? As for headaches from
Low bloods - this is one of low blood sugars side effects. If I've had y really bad hypo - 3 and below sometimes then I take a couple of paracetamol and try and get back in the saddle or as I'm well retired - I go back to bed and sleep it off.
If you can get a Libre 2 system from your doc and set the low blood alarm at say 4mmols then you will get a warning and take some glucose before you even get to the low blood stage. Either that or have just a weetabix before you got to bed. Don't worry yourself about the numbers game- there's too much of that these days imho. It's your diabetes - nobody else's. Hope this helps a bit ?

 

[Twopoodles]

I've been working really hard at getting my numbers down to the extent that I'm getting 4am hypos - 3mmol - fortunately a headache wakes me up but then stays with me for several hours! Is this something normal? Unfortunately I'm about a 1000 miles from my diabetic nurse atm!

 

[SimonP78]

Headaches with low blood sugar don't always happen but they are quite common, and before the days of CGMs were a useful way of knowing that you may have gradually slipped down into hypo range (which is more difficult to feel than a faster drop). The type of headache is quite easy to identify, well it was for me, we're all different!

As @Antje77 said, what type of insulin/medication are you taking - it sounds like it may be too much, otherwise if you drink in the afternoon/evening of the previous day this may cause hypos. One easy suggest as given above is a bedtime snack, but a better solution would be to work out if something else can be tweaked to avoid the situation completely.

 

[KennyA]

I've been working really hard at getting my numbers down to the extent that I'm getting 4am hypos - 3mmol - fortunately a headache wakes me up but then stays with me for several hours! Is this something normal? Unfortunately I'm about a 1000 miles from my diabetic nurse atm!

I get the very low BG in the early mornings. I'm T2 on no medication, and as of April this year I won't have had a BG out of normal range for five years. The sweats etc. started around 2014/5, not sure. When it happens, I get nightmares and really extreme sweating - it happened last night after about a six week break. Until I tried a CGM a few years ago I had no idea that these sweats coincided with low BG, but they do.

There isn't a great deal of knowledge about this, but I do know from my local low carb group that some non-diabetic people who've used a CGM have reported exactly the same thing: a sudden cliff-edge drop in BG that lasts minutes, if that, followed by a very steady rise that seems to turn into dawn phenomenon. There is some "confirmation" of this in research:

Continuous Glucose Monitoring Profiles in Healthy Nondiabetic Participants: A Multicenter Prospective Study - PMC

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

This piece of research is on non-diabetic people using a CGM, intended to establish a sort of baseline and an idea of what "normal" looks like in modern CGM use. You'll see towards the end in the "Discussion" section they mention that there were a number of these "very low BG in the early hours" incidents, which they found a bit baffling, the subjects being non-diabetic etc...

It's often put down to "lying on the sensor" but I don't think that lying on the sensor explains what causes the sweats and nightmares - which are exactly what you'd expect from an actual low BG. I think this is an attempt to "explain away" rather than to really explain what's going on. @Jasmin2000 suggested to me in another thread this fall in BG could equally be caused by a increase in insulin - but no-one seems to be interested in doing any work on it.

 

[Garlanor]

Hi , I’m not diabetic but have suffered with migraines since puberty , I’m now 72 ! I’ve worked out my migraines are caused by low blood sugar or possibly high insulin levels . I’ve been a lot better in the last year since I stopped trying to diet to lose weight. Tea , coffee and fruit on an emptying stomach is a sure fire trigger for low blood sugar . Itry not to have anything sweet near bedtime but have some cheese, meat or nuts before bed , cheeks seems to work best , proper cheese not low fat. I think it’s 5he ratio of fat to protein which works . I’m on citalopram which makes me put weight on but got really bad when I came off it even though I thought I’d done it slowly .