I definitely sweat when low–dunno about profusely–but only when it gets below 60.
That matches my experience too.
The only time I sweat is when I am falling fast and the hypo is always hard to turn around. Slow falling hypos when I am relaxed watching TV or when I am sick give few symptoms and when I test BGL have not fallen below 2.5mmmol/L (45).
I have just past 10 since being diagnosed with Type 1 and consider myself to be not hypo unaware because I detect most hypos before 2.8 mmol/L.
I used to sweat profusely if I went low at night, but I don’t these days because I wake up and fix my low BG first. The change didn’t happen with the animal/human change, which was many years ago; it happened more recently, maybe only 10 years since it has happened since I moved to Oregon (2001). I suspect it’s a combination of going low less rapidly (that’s one human vs porcine thing), much better BG control (which also slows down the swing) and simply becoming more hypo aware.
Like other people I have to get to <60mg/dl before the sweating starts.
I suspect hypo/hyper awareness increases with closer BG control, or rather it decreases with less close control because we get used to the lows and highs.
John Bowler
I’ve been on insulin five years. The first year or so I used to sweat when I’d have a hypo, but then it was a long time that that didn’t happen. My guess was that as I had repeated hypos, I became more hypo unaware. I often got down to the low 40s or even as low as low 30s mg/dl before I’d notice something was amiss and check my BG.
Then in February I got a Freestyle Libre. With the newfound ability to take my BG sometimes 35-50 times a day, I rarely had hypos and those I had rarely went lower than about 60. Then within the past week I had hypos in the 40s twice. And both times I did notice definite sweating again. I suspect it is just that avoiding hypos for so long restored enough of my hypo awareness that previous symptoms have returned.
One thing that happened to me after I moved to the US was that I had to adapt from blood glucose in mM to mg/dl. That didn’t happen immediately - I brought a pen-sized tester from the UK and it used test strips available in the US and read out in mM. I targeted 5mM - anything below was “low”, that’s 90mg/dl (multiply by 18). Unfortunately around 2000 that changed and I couldn’t get the strips so I had to start using the weird US measurement.
Now, I have a degree in chemistry and I know exactly how much a molecule of glucose weighs, but somewhere I made a really bad error - I multiplied by 10, not 18 and started not to worry unless by BG was below 50mg/dl. I was going low pretty often, I knew I was but I was able to manage with treatment below 50. These days I am aware if my BG hits somewhere between 70 and 80; I get false positives but a BG test or a glance at my cellphone identifies those as highs, not lows.
John Bowler
My two main symptoms for being low are sweating and an urge to rub my stomach. The stomach rubbing is usually during the day or when I am awake and conscious, while sweating is usually during the night or when I don’t notice being low right away. I have had times when I was low overnight and would wake up so sweaty you could wring out my pajamas and watch the sweat drip onto the floor and they felt like I took a shower while wearing them. When I was first diagnosed (about 30 years ago, sometime in early elementary school), I did not have the stomach rubbing urges, so sweating is the symptom that I have had the longest, but the stomach rubbing is more immediate (since it is the usual symptom when I am awake).