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Night time hypo

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Fransteven

Newbie
Messages
4
Good morning everyone,
I hoping all you lovely people will have some advice for me.
I've been diabetic for 15 years and always had hypos during the night but more recently, because I'm using a Freestyle sensor, I've noticed that I'm having prolonged hypos and not waking up for them. I've been using the sensor for 1 year and it's only in the last 4-5 months that I've noticed I've had a hypo without waking up, but for the last 5 or 6 weeks now, my hypos are getting longer and longer. 2 hours has been fairly average but last night it was for 6 hours. I didn't feel a thing, and my sugars always come back up on their own (textbook foot to the floor syndrome).
I always check my sensor is accurate by doing routine finger pricks, so I know it's not that.
I reduced my long lasting insulin a week ago to see if that helped too.

I'm worried that if I'm not waking up the I could end up having a seizure or going into a coma. I'm also a little hesitant to tell my consultant because of the fear of the impact on other things like driving (although I am very aware of daytime hypos).

What should I do folks?

Thanks,
Fran
 
Hi and welcome to the forum. I assume you are a T1.

The freestyle libre is notoriously inaccurate under 4. You should always double check with a fingerprick.
 
Welcome. I would set an alarm to wake up to check my blood sugars with a finger prick.
 
You seem to have been having night hypos for years from what you are saying. Have you not made other attempts to prevent this, or is dropping your basal insulin for this last week the first ?
 
JMK1954 said:
You seem to have been having night hypos for years from what you are saying. Have you not made other attempts to prevent this, or is dropping your basal insulin for this last week the first ?
Click to expand...

I've played around with my basal insulin loads over the years. The consultant has helped me with that too. I even take it in the morning now instead of the classic night time job, so that it's wearing thin by bedtime. I'm on Levemir so there is always a bit of overlap too.

My worry isn't necessarily the fact I'm having the hypos, it's the fact I'm not showing symptoms and waking up. Stopping the hypos would be great but the symptom awareness is a bigger problem to me.
 
Fransteven said:
I'm worried that if I'm not waking up the I could end up having a seizure or going into a coma. I'm also a little hesitant to tell my consultant because of the fear of the impact on other things like driving (although I am very aware of daytime hypos).
Click to expand...
The DVLA do not care about night time hypos when you are asleep as lets face it you're not going to be driving at that point, so you should be able to talk to your consultant about it without fear of losing your license especially if your daytime awareness is perfectly fine. I know Lantus used to often cause night time hypos for me (as I found out when using the libre - never knew before then) and I never woke up, so I asked my consultant to change to Tresiba as it has a flatter profile - it did calm the hypos down a lot - though the libre can be affected if you lie on it so that may well make it look lower than it actually is.
 
Rokaab said:
The DVLA do not care about night time hypos when you are asleep as lets face it you're not going to be driving at that point, so you should be able to talk to your consultant about it without fear of losing your license especially if your daytime awareness is perfectly fine. I know Lantus used to often cause night time hypos for me (as I found out when using the libre - never knew before then) and I never woke up, so I asked my consultant to change to Tresiba as it has a flatter profile - it did calm the hypos down a lot - though the libre can be affected if you lie on it so that may well make it look lower than it actually is.
Click to expand...

Oh my goodness, I have never heard of this before! I will do some reading up on it and see if there is anything I can do to prevent it. Maybe I'm not putting the sensor in the right place and that means I'm lying on it for a long time. If I can do some finger prick tests during the night too, then that should confirm if it's the problem.
My other half will hate me for alarms going off in the middle of the night - but it'll be worth it!

Thanks also @sleepster for the name of it :)
 
Also remember that the freestyle has a 15 to 20 minute lag against a fingerprick.
 
I wear my sensor on the inside of my arm which seems to cut down on the the number of pressure lows.
 
I believe I lost my hypo awareness because of persistent overnight hypos over a period of years. They always woke me .... until suddenly they didn't. At the same point, I realised my hypo warning symptoms during the day were becoming much less apparent. A few tests during the night would establish whether you have a Libre compression problem or a genuine hypo. The fact that you have a history of night hypos makes it more important to establish what is happening.
 
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