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Actress Christina Applegate has revealed she does not have multiple sclerosis (MS), despite her 2021 diagnosis.
The Married… with Children icon, 54, has been battling a debilitating illness for several years, believing it to be MS.
She has now shared that she is ‘back to square one’ after a doctor confirmed it wasn’t the brain and spinal cord condition.
‘She came into my room and said, “Congratulations, you don’t have MS”,’ Christina shared on her Messy podcast with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who was diagnosed with MS at 20.
She continued: ‘I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy. You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better.
‘I haven’t gotten better! If anything, I’ve gotten worse. So I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me.’
Christina has been forced to use a wheelchair and a cane, as well as step back from her acting career due to her illness.
‘That’s going to be an online investigation that my doctors are going to be getting into just to find out what has been going on since 2021, why did this happen?’ she added.
MS is an incurable condition where the immune system attacks the body and causes nerve damage, targeting the brain and spinal cord.
Symptoms include fatigue, difficulty walking, vision problems, numbness and problems with thinking, which range in severity.
Christina shared how her condition had resulted in her going through ‘a great depression’, saying she had ‘lost everything’.
‘I lost my job. I lost – I’m sorry. What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years – God, I’m so sorry – because it stopped my life,’ she said.
‘I still have to use wheelchairs when I go to the doctor’s office. I can’t walk from the car to the room. I’m still in this. Nothing magical happened when she said, “You don’t have MS.” Nothing magical happened.’
For the Dead to Me star, the diagnosis change came with additional anxiety as she had become a ‘poster child’ for the condition.
‘It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down, It’s this weird feeling because I became this – you and I, the poster children for MS,’ Christina added to Jamie-Lynn.
‘And everything I was doing. I had a reason. I had a reason as to why my day sucked every day.
‘And now I don’t have a reason and it’s very unnerving and it’s very confusing for me.’
She added that she is still in a ‘state of shock’ over the doctor’s revelation, which came five years after she shared her diagnosis publicly.
Last month, Christina gave an update after reports that she’d spent a prolonged amount of time in hospital.
She returned to social media to show off her new hair, which was a ‘fresh colour’ but noted there was a ‘new weird spot’ on her cheek.
In 2023, Christina announced her on-screen retirement, revealing that she would not be able to act on camera anymore due to her illness.
However, at the time, she said that she would still be open to voice-over work and has released a memoir, You With the Sad Eyes.