You are not necessarily a doctor, I am not your patient, I am not seeking a course of treatment, etc.
Since my early 20s I have occasionally suffered bouts of night sweats. I don’t mean getting a little damp when the weather is warm–I mean drenching sweats, enough to soak through multiple changes of clothes, such that when I wake up I can feel it running off my body in rivulets.
These sweats always occur in cold or cold-ish weather–I used to live in the northeast, now I’m in Southern California. Sometimes they happen for one night and go away, sometimes they recur for 3-4 nights in a row. They vary from one or two changes of bedclothes (I sleep in a T-shirt and underwear) to as many as 8 or 10, with the bed so soaked I have to get out towels to sleep on.
When the problem is at its worst, packing on lots of extra blankets seems to help a little, but doesn’t make it go away entirely.
I have tried to keep track of my condition when the sweats occur–not in a terribly systematic way, but it doesn’t seem to be associated with alcohol (or abstinence), spicy foods, stress, gluten, soybeans, peanuts…
Generally, this is a problem I have in my own bed, very infrequently when I travel (though I don’t travel a huge amount, so that maybe doesn’t mean anything.)
This is hardly the worst problem in the world but it’s one I’d rather not have. Anyone got ideas? When I have asked my doctors, they just shrug and suggest the house is too hot/too many blankets, which is not the problem.
Have you tried running a fan on your body every night? Just don’t point it at your head, or else you may wake up with uncomfortably dry eyes/nose/mouth.
The casual googling I just did indicates that night sweats may have hormonal causes. Since it’s happening more than once a week (and your doc keeps shrugging helplessly instead of helping you), perhaps you could ask for a referral to an endocrinologist. Are you female? If so, do your symptoms correlate in any way to your menstrual cycle?
I’m not female, I should have specified. Also to clarify, it’s not as frequent as once a week–at the moment I think its been about six weeks since the last time. But there are times when I have multiple occurrences in a week.
Medical advice for specific people goes in IMHO because people are so specific that you can’t really make a pronouncement of “this is what it is” for every person every time - and that’s really what GQ is about.
If you had asked what common causes of night sweats were, and what they tend to be symptomatic of, it might have gotten a pass to stay here, but from what I can see, most medical *symptomatic *questions tend to head over to IMHO.
No one’s saying anything’s wrong with your question or your posts - things get moved around all the time here.
I’m not sure if there’s a physiological/western medicine explanation, but many people do notice a correlation between lung problems and excessive sweating, especially at night. It’s a connection long recognized in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine, so if you have nighttime sweating, they’re going to look to your Lungs for dysfunction.
In western medicine, one of the more commonly recognized symptoms of TB is nighttime sweats. TB symptoms come and go, but untreated can last a lifetime of coming and going. The test is simple, but it does require two office visits a few days apart, and a follow up x-ray if the skin test is positive.
There are other things that can cause nighttime sweating, of course. But TB is an easy one to test for and rule out, and since it is contagious, it’s a good idea to find out if you have it.
I just had a TB test (for unrelated reasons) so that’s not it. I have “lung problems” in that I tend to get bronchitis almost every year, although as I recall the sweats don’t happen at the same time as other illness.
I’ve had the same problem. What has worked for me is to wear a hat to bed. It seems to be that with no hat my body thinks “cold” and works to warm up, but under the covers I’m sweating.
Been wearing a hat kinda like this for a while and it helps a lot.
Whew! That’s the most worrisome, from a public health perspective. When I hear long term intermittent night sweats, suddenly it’s everyone around you that I’m worried about. If that’s not it, then we can just worry about you.
And from there, we’re unfortunately into “could be anything” territory. Could just be a bedroom where the heat fluctuates a lot, or hyperthyroidism, or an adrenal tumor or overactive pituitary or wonky hypothalamus. Could be the wrong blanket or cancer. It could be just so many things that internet advice without a thorough physical exam and health history is just damn useless.
Brain injury, even minor, can compromise the regulation of body temperature. Heat stroke, general anesthesia, concussion, drug use can cause these mild injuries. When it’s cold your core temperature drops and the body lags in warming up, then overcompensates and you wake up in a river of sweat. I keep the room temp at 68, run a ceiling fan, and wear an extra shirt. A very good medical acupuncurist can really help. Mine warms me up for winter, then lets heat out for summer. It’s absurd and non-rational and I feel like an idiot asking her to adjust me for summer, but it works great.
I sort of doubt it’s cancer–this has been going on for 20 years. If it’s cancer it’s the laziest cancer there is.
Looking at what you wrote, it seems like a lot of the causes could be hormonal. I have never had anything like that show up on my physicals, but then I don’t know what they test for beyond kidney/liver/blood sugar/cholesterol. Is there a separate panel of tests that would reveal glandular problems?
This happens to me. I keep my bedroom extremely cold by leaving the window open even in the Winter. Some nights I misjudge how cold it’s going to get overnight and my room gets too cold. I wake up to find that I have snuggled so far under my down comforter that I am actually drenched in sweat. Sounds weird, but the colder my room is, the more I have those sweats.
I second Whynots observation, that inter net advice (seeking medical opinions or diagnoses) is “damm useless”…university hospitals have all kinds of resources and different specialty departments, perhaps if your able to go to one of these for a work up by a specialist of some sort
