Cold sweats on chest at 3am

In our current lives, many people have frequent nightmares and night sweats when they sleep at night, especially in the early morning. This phenomenon will become more serious. Sometimes there will be chest pain. When you wake up in the morning, you will feel a severe headache. After a night of sleep, the body will still feel particularly tired. These are all symptoms of nocturnal hypoglycemia.

Cold sweats on your chest at three in the morning should alert you to the possibility of a cold or nocturnal hypoglycemia. If the symptoms recur, you can go to the hospital for a blood sugar test.

Causes of nocturnal hypoglycemia

1. Eating too little:

As the weather gradually turns cooler, the human body consumes more energy. Since it gets dark early, dinner time may be advanced, and since the nights are long and the days are short, breakfast time may be postponed. Therefore, the time interval between dinner and breakfast will be longer than in summer. If the amount of food intake and exercise is still the same as usual, nocturnal hypoglycemia may occur. The result is that the incidence of hypoglycemia may be higher in autumn and winter than in summer.

2. Too much exercise:

The period from dinner to the next day's breakfast is long. If you eat less at dinner, do too much activity after dinner without replenishing food, or have poor gastrointestinal function, frequent bowel movements, insufficient absorption of nutrients or excessive loss of nutrients, the body will suffer from insufficient energy reserves.

3. Not well treated:

During drug treatment, especially insulin treatment, if the dosage and maintenance time of long-acting and short-acting insulin are not well controlled, or if patients taking oral sulfonylurea hypoglycemic drugs overdose or use them improperly, they are more likely to experience hypoglycemia.

Consequences of hypoglycemia

Milder symptoms of hypoglycemia can disappear quickly as blood sugar returns to normal, but symptoms of brain dysfunction may take hours, days, or even longer to disappear. Since brain cells can only rely on glucose for energy, hypoglycemia can easily cause ischemia and hypoxia of brain cells. Severe and persistent (>6 hours) hypoglycemia can lead to permanent brain dysfunction or death.

Repeated hypoglycemia can also easily lead to memory loss and increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease. It can also reduce the warning symptoms of hypoglycemia and even cause hypoglycemia coma without warning symptoms. Hypoglycemia in the elderly can easily induce complications such as arrhythmia, angina pectoris, myocardial infarction and cerebrovascular accident. Acute hypoglycemia may also cause cerebral edema.