Profuse night sweats-just me??

[lrobertson]

I am wondering if night sweats can be a side effects from our bodies fighting autoimmune disease or if anyone out there is experiencing what i am. OK, yes….I am menapausal woman in mid 50’s, but I really don’t think it is that, as i have no hot flashes, and am not hot when i sleep, i just sweat. I sweat in the weirdest places to, like especially my arms and wrists. My doc thinks it might be autoimmune, and wanted to see if I was the only one or if others experiencing this too

[A Friend]

Hello Laura,
It may be that your nightsweats have a similar cause to my own quite a number of years ago. Rather than keyboard from scratch, I went to “General Discussion” link at top, which has a little search window by it, and then typed in “nightsweats” and quickly got many hits… one of them is some of the information about my own experience.

This is the link to the post found from the search: [Actually, once this link opened, the one I thought this link was copying is a post or two above it. You can just scroll up a couple of posts on this subject. Sorry about that. af]

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8014&p=64154&hilit=night+sweats#p64154

Another thing I want to mention regarding what you had in your post is that one of the reasons women have hot flashes is because their mineral stores get used up by the body for neutralizing acidic waste so the wastes can be safely excreted by the kidneys. Detoxification like we usually have when we are herxing on AP makes us need more magnesium, etc. than we normally would. The nightsweats can cause a drain of a lot of our mineral stores… faster than we normally consume them. After my nightsweats had gone on for a while, I began having “charlie horses” in my legs, even though generally I was feeling better and better. Women usually try to get a lot of calcium, but calcium functions along with magnesium, and we may not have enough magnesium left for other things when we are dealing with nightsweats and herxing, etc.

Good luck. We can discuss this more, if you’d like more information about my own experience.

AF

[Randy]

My wife had significant night sweats without hot flashes. No AI. Yes menapausal. They diminish.

Diffuse SD since Apr '07
AP since Feb '08
100mg Mino twice daily
Stopped Clindamycin IVs Aug 2019
"No one should profit over someone else's illness"

[JeffN]

Back when I first had SD and before I began AP I was in a three week night sweat cycle. The cycle consisted of a few nights with increasing night sweats, probably four nights, and then the sweats would cease and my SD symptoms would be somewhat decreased. Then my pains would gradually increase again over a couple of weeks leading to another session of night sweats after which I would feel a little better again and so on. I was never able to figure it out but have wondered if the sweats/elevated temp was killing off bacteria or similar. It was repeatable as it continued for several months and disappeared after begining mino. Do you have the sweats constantly or now and again? Is there a pattern?

[Maz]

@lrobertson wrote:

I am wondering if night sweats can be a side effects from our bodies fighting autoimmune disease or if anyone out there is experiencing what i am. OK, yes….I am menapausal woman in mid 50’s, but I really don’t think it is that, as i have no hot flashes, and am not hot when i sleep, i just sweat. I sweat in the weirdest places to, like especially my arms and wrists. My doc thinks it might be autoimmune, and wanted to see if I was the only one or if others experiencing this too

Hi Laura,

In addition to the suggestions above, a few extra thoughts came to mind.

Might be helpful to ask your doc to run some full hormone panels to check thyroid and adrenal function, as well as ovarian hormones. Thyroid can mess up lots of metabolic processes and, even if taking some type of thyroid med, fluctuations in thyroid hormones can lead to having to adjust doses at intervals. Adrenal fatigue – common in AI diseases – can also lead to night sweats. Imbalances in sugar levels can be another cause.

Aside from hormonal imbalances, there are quite a few other causes of night sweats listed at the following links, some causes more serious than others. Interestingly, even something as simple as undx’d sleep apnea or GERD can lead to night sweats:

http://www.aafp.org/afp/2003/0301/p1019.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hyperhidrosis

Some infections can be a cause of night sweats, too….fungal, as AF mentioned above, but also others as listed in the links. Lyme is mentioned in the wiki link, but another infection that can cause drenching night sweats is babesiosis.

You may need to walk through a process of elimination to get to the bottom of this, Laura. Let us know how you get on and all the best with this.

[Author]

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