Medicines that can cause night sweats

The medicines most often linked to night sweats are some antidepressants, steroids and painkillers, which are the three the NHS night sweats page names. MedlinePlus adds thyroid hormone and medicines that bring down a fever, and diabetes medicines can cause sweating through low blood sugar in the night. Keep taking whatever you have been prescribed and take the question to a pharmacist. A side effect on a list tells you what to ask about, but it cannot tell you that your medicine is the cause.

The checklist below sorts the medicines you take into those groups and builds a short list to show the pharmacist. You do not need to type the names of your medicines.

The seven groups and their sources

Every group below is named as a possible cause of sweating by the NHS or by MedlinePlus, the health information site of the US National Library of Medicine. Each entry links to the pages it is taken from. The checklist pulls these same entries into your list.

Can sertraline cause night sweats?

Yes. MedlinePlus lists excessive sweating among sertraline's side effects and asks you to tell your doctor if it is severe or does not go away. The NHS sertraline page is less direct. Its list of common side effects leaves sweating out and names it only as one sign of serotonin syndrome, while the NHS antidepressants page counts sweating more than normal among the common side effects of the whole class, sertraline included.

Neither source says the sweating comes only at night. It is simply harder to miss in bed, where it soaks the sheets. The NHS adds that many antidepressant side effects ease after a couple of weeks as your body gets used to the medicine, though some last longer. Sweating also appears in the NHS list of withdrawal symptoms when an antidepressant is stopped, so missed doses are worth mentioning too. That is why the checklist asks question 3.

When menopause and a medicine overlap

Menopause hot flushes head the NHS list of night sweat causes, and many medicines on this page are started in the same years. A woman of 50 who begins an antidepressant may have perimenopause sweats already, and a pharmacist cannot pull the two apart without dates. What helps most is a plain timeline: when the sweats began, when each medicine or dose started, and whether you get hot flashes by day as well. Our printable night diary gives each night one line for that.

If you would rather keep the record on your phone, Her Good Days is a free app that logs night sweats with the time and how severe they were, next to your sleep and your medications with each dose change. It can show the weeks before and after a day you pick, such as the day you started a new medicine, as plain counts, and turn the dates you choose into a PDF for your doctor, marked as reported by you. Its app store listings are coming soon.

A worked example

Take a reader aged 52 who started sertraline in September and has taken gliclazide for type 2 diabetes for years. Her sweats began in October. She ticks the antidepressant and diabetes groups, answers yes to a new medicine and no to missed doses.

Her list carries both entries, with the serotonin syndrome warning and the advice to check her blood sugar if she wakes shaky. Because she answered yes to question 2, it also reminds her to write down the date she started sertraline. At the counter she can ask whether the timing fits sertraline, and whether the night sweats could be hypos instead, which the NHS wants a GP to know about. Had she ticked only "None of these", her list would say no group matched and point her back to menopause and the other NHS causes.

Taking it to the pharmacist

Bring the list, the boxes or the repeat prescription slip, and anything you buy yourself, since supplements and remedies count when a pharmacist checks for side effects. The NHS page on excessive sweating also sends you to a pharmacist first and to a GP if the sweating happens at night or you take medicine for another condition. In England, if one of your medicines is newly prescribed for a condition such as depression or type 2 diabetes, you can ask to join the New Medicine Service: three free conversations with a pharmacist over several weeks, who can send you back to your GP if needed. In the US, the pharmacist who fills your prescription can answer the same questions.

If a medicine is the likely cause, the NHS says a GP may prescribe a different one. That decision belongs to you and your prescriber, so carry on with every medicine as prescribed until you have spoken to them. If your sweats come with a fever, weight loss or a cough, use our night sweats warning-signs checker first. For a GP appointment, our doctor question builder helps you write down your questions about sweats and sleep.

My take

I'd start with the pharmacist, ahead of searching each medicine online. A pharmacist sees everything you take at once, including the ibuprofen and the supplements, and leaflets list dozens of side effects that most people never get. I'd go in with dates written down, because "the sweats started three weeks after the new tablets" is the sentence that moves the conversation on. And I'd never test the idea by skipping doses at home: the withdrawal sweating several of these medicines can cause would only muddy the answer. The other causes of sweating at night, menopause first among them, are covered in our night sweats section.

This checklist matches the groups you tick against published side-effect lists. It is an aid for a conversation with a pharmacist or doctor, and it cannot tell you what is causing your sweats.