Christina Applegate, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis back in 2021 and has become a leading advocate for people coping with the disease, revealed shocking news Tuesday: She was misdiagnosed and does not in fact have MS.
In an emotional episode of MeSsy, the podcast she hosts with Jamie Lynn Sigler as, in Applegate’s description, the poster children of MS, the former Married With Children star says recent tests turned up some very surprising results.
In the first part of a two-part podcast episode, Applegate describes the moment her doctor told her the latest news: “She came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.’ I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” a tearful Applegate says. “I haven’t gotten better, Jamie! If anything, I’ve gotten worse. So I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me. And 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?”
Summing up the latest development, Applegate says, “It’s a mindf*ck for sure.”
In the second episode of the two-parter, Applegate and Sigler were joined by Dr. Marwa Kaisey, associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology. The doctor explains that MS misdiagnoses are “fairly common.”
“We don’t have one single test for MS,” Kaisey says. “It’s not like we have something like a pregnancy test that says, ‘Yes. You have it.’ ‘No. You don’t.’ It’s a list of criteria.” According to Kaisey, nearly 1 in 5 people diagnosed with MS don’t actually have it, “and a majority of them were on medication to treat their MS.”
Applegate describes the psychic toll taken by her illness. “I’ve gone through a great depression because of it,” she says during the second episode. “But I 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. 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.”
Applegate also shares her new feelings about her longtime MS advocacy. “It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down,” she says. “It’s this weird feeling because I became this — you and I, the poster children for MS. And everything I was doing, I had a reason. I had a f*cking 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.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, MS is a chronic, immune-mediated disorder of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) that causes muscle weakness, vision changes, numbness, memory loss and gastrointestinal issues.
Applegate, who has written about her illness in the memoir You With the Sad Eyes, announced last March that she had been hospitalized for treatment and testing. “I’m taking a moment to focus on my health,” she wrote on Instagram at the time, “but I’ll be back with more to say soon enough.” The podcast resumed April 21 with Sigler hosting along with various special guests. Tuesday’s episodes were Applegate’s first back since then.
Applegate was while filming the Netflix series Dead to Me when she first experienced symptoms, and has appeared in public only infrequently since the diagnosis. In an emotional 2024 appearance at the Emmy Awards, Applegate was greeted with a standing ovation to present the nominees in the Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series category.
With her usual wry sense of humor, she joked, “You’re totally shaming me with disability by standing up, but it’s OK.”
On the new podcast episodes, Applegate assures Sigler and her audience that the podcast will continue. Her health journey, she notes, “is the same game with a different name.”