Waking up, high pulse

Hello everyone - 3 years ago, I’ve been diagnosed with a type 2.

The only problem I have is that from time to time, I wake up at night with a high pulse; I first thought those were hypoglycemias, but when measuring my levels, they are rather on my high side (7.5-9 mmol/l). I can’t figure out what causes it, and so can’t my doctor. My guesses are 1) it’s an allergic reaction (I’m allergic to dust mites), 2) it’s a stress reaction, 3) carb intake at dinner (I’m eating low-carb throughout the day, and eating heavier in the evening).

Any ideas?

Hi Timm.
I might be WAY off base here, since I only know of one of your symptoms, but I wanted to share in hopes of you finding a path toward answers. Shortly after I was Dx T1 last year, I had repeated episodes of my heart racing. I too, thought I was going low, but when I checked, I was normal. After MANY doctors (and ruling out everything else like early menopause, cancer, adrenal failure, etc.), there was finally an answer: Postural Orthostatic Tachychardia Syndrome. Here’s a link so you can read if it’s anything like what you are experiencing. http://www.dinet.org/pots_an_overview.htm

Most doctors aren’t aware of it, but I recently found one who is and he’s helping me. If it sounds like you, that link has links to Drs who are aware of POTS.

I know how frustrating it can be to not know! Good luck in finding some answers.

Hi Timm -

Two thoughts…
First, do you have a way to check your blood pressure?
Secondly, do you take any other medications or any medications for hypothyroidism?

Question - if you are a Type 2 taking both short and long-acting insulin, why are you also taking novonorm? This would be my guess for the palpitations - I was able to find this:

“Cardiovascular Events
In one-year trials comparing PRANDIN to sulfonylurea drugs, the incidence of angina was comparable (1.8%) for both treatments, with an incidence of chest pain of 1.8% for PRANDIN and 1.0% for sulfonylureas. The incidence of other selected cardiovascular events (hypertension, abnormal EKG, myocardial infarction, arrhythmias, and palpitations) was ≤ 1% and not different between PRANDIN and the comparator drugs.”

Cheri

I had the same thing happened to me for about a couple of months. I have several theories. Here is what I think was happening to me. After I stopped taking januvia I realized that it tore my stomach up and I had a very sensitive stomach. Any time I had stomach issues my blood pressure would should up to 190/100 and pulse of 100 bpm. I thought it was high blood pressure since before I was on 10 mg per day and it would control my bp. But after Januvia my bp was uncontrolable. So finally i got the BP under somewhat control by excercising, stopping Januvia and doing metformin only, and eating better. In about 4 months after stopping januvia I noticed that I would wake up with a server headache, shakes and the high pulse. I would go bike from 7 pm to 9 pm and have a night time snack. At this point my glucose numbers were comming down to a normal range, but I would get the feeling of a low when I was in the 70’s during the day. I started to think that maybe I was going low at night because I read an article that talked about type 2 body reacting to perceive lows during a period of time when your body is readjusting to normal numbers and night time normal low numbers would cause an adrenaline kick that would release glucose to the body to deal with the percieved low. They call it a false reaction. When the adrenaline kicks in your body gets the rapid heartbeat, the sweats, and then you woke up with a high and wonder what the hell happened since you have a high reading. This happened to me for about a month, then I started to get up every two hours at night to test the theory. Sure enough I noticed that I would go from 140 after eating a snack at 9:30 pm, to 120 at 11:30 pm. i would go to sleep at that time and wake up at 1:30 am in the 90’s and would be down to between 70 and 90 at about 3 am. Which was the time that I was waking up with the fast heartbeat and sweats.

So the next few nights I would eat a small snack at 1:30 am and then no more night sweats and fast heartbeats.

During the day we can feel the lows comming, but at night as a type 2 they come without warning and the body tries to manage with other means to get the percieved lows back to normal

Here is an article that kinda talks about this night time issue, but if you google on adrenaline and night time lows you should be able to find a lot of information on this type of issue

http://kidshealth.org/teen/managing_diabetes/living/hypoglycemia.html#

hope this helps or points you in the right direction

Interesting link, I’ve never heard about that syndrome. On the one hand, I do seem to have a slightly higher pulse than other people. On the other hand, my heart races at night in bed, which doesn’t correspond to the POTS description. Anyway, I’ll keep it in mind - thank you for your answer!