I had weeks of night sweats, I used to wake up in the morning from the cold water, I would literally rinse out of my besheets in a bucket.
Not sure if anyone cares. TNF-alpha is a temperature regulator. One way to kill bacteria is to raise the body temeprature, it makes bacteria vulnerable since they're not used to the increased heat, your body is. The same things happens in Tuberculosis:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25085730/What-Causes-Night-Sweats-in-Tuberculosis
"
It seems likely that the night sweats associated with active tuberculosis are a response in part tosignalling molecules released by cells of the immune system as they react to the infectiousorganism. The bacteria themselves may also be releasing fever-causing signals. In response tothese circulating chemical signals the hypothalamus resets body temperature to a higher level for a while. Later, body temperature is returned to normal, and the extra heat is lost by sweating.Tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) is one of the peptide signalling molecules implicated intriggering night sweats."
If you read old accounts of white fathers in Africa, before TB patients had proper treatment, they used to have night swets all the time. TB preceded antibiotics, if people got a TB infection, the prognosis was death. They used to have night sweats all the time.
I doubt in crohn's disease that the night swets are caused by treatment, it's the inflammation. The night sweats are probably a reaction to stabilise the body temperature after fevers. This is also why I feel there is an infectious agent involved in crohn's disease, there are a lot of similarities with crohn's disease and TB infection, the granuloma, the skip lesions, night sweats, etc. Crohn's disease can mimmick intestinal TB very accurately.
When people get infliximab for the first time, they are given a shot a few days before treatment with a needle to test for TB, the mantoux test. I'm sure everyone knows about that who had kids or had remicade themselves. Infliimab can reactivate latent TB. But I think very few people know that immunosupressants are often used during infections, it is often needed to stop the destructive inflammation, it might make the infection slightly worse, but sometimes the priority is stopping the destructive inflammation. Imuran was used for some infections, it seems counterintuitive, but sometimes the most important thing is treating the inflammation, and then the infection. That also tends to reduce fever and night sweats in those people.
