Christina Applegate Says She Was Misdiagnosed With MS, and Is Back at Square One

LOS ANGELES

Christina Applegate returned to her podcast on Tuesday with news her listeners were not expecting, delivered through tears. The 54-year-old actor, who shared in 2021 that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and became one of the most visible faces of living with the disease, told MeSsY co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler that her doctor had informed her during a hospital stay earlier this year that she had been misdiagnosed. She does not have MS.

Applegate recalled the moment plainly. "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." The episode, released Tuesday, October 20, was her first after a months-long step back from the podcast that included several months in hospital, time she used, in part, to process what the reversal meant.

Good news that does not feel like good news

The reason for her reaction is the part of the story she was most determined to explain. Removing the diagnosis did not remove the illness. "You don't get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I'm better. I haven't gotten better," she said. "If anything, I've gotten worse in some ways. So I'm back at square one, that I don't know what's going on with me." She said her doctors will now investigate what has actually been happening since 2021, noting that she has every symptom associated with MS, every single one, and still relies heavily on a wheelchair for basic mobility.

Clinicians who work with patients through diagnosis reversals say that reaction is more common than outsiders expect. Gina Moffa, a grief and trauma therapist in New York City, told USA Today that on paper a misdiagnosis is good news, but a diagnosis, even a devastating one, gives a person something to hold and some sense of direction. When that diagnosis is taken away, so is the plan for how to move forward. "In a lot of ways, you're somewhere harder, because now you're still struggling and suffering, and you've lost the map," Moffa said.

How common a wrong MS diagnosis is

Applegate and Sigler devoted a second episode to the medicine, joined by Dr. Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor in the department of neurology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Kaisey explained that there is no single test that confirms MS: diagnosis rests on a list of criteria rather than a definitive yes-or-no result. Nearly one in five people diagnosed with MS do not actually have it, she said, and a majority of those misdiagnosed patients were taking medication to treat a disease they did not have. That context reframes Applegate's five years: not a freak error, but a known weakness in how a difficult disease gets identified, with consequences that include years of treatment aimed at the wrong target and, now, a diagnostic search that starts again.

Applegate first shared her diagnosis in August 2021, while filming the third and final season of Netflix's Dead to Me. In her memoir You with the Sad Eyes, released in March, she wrote that symptoms including numbness had been building for a while before a neurologist showed her images of her brain and pointed to roughly thirty lesions. Her decline during that final season was visible enough that Netflix considered shutting the production down, she wrote; the show's creator, Liz Feldman, suggested ending the series early, and Applegate insisted on finishing the story. She subsequently stepped back from on-screen acting, built the MeSsY podcast with Sigler, who was herself diagnosed with MS at age 20, and launched Next in MS, an online platform for people living with the disease.

The advocate's dilemma

That public role is the other wound in Tuesday's revelation. Applegate said she felt she had let everybody down after becoming, in her words, a poster child for MS: years of advocacy, community and identity built on a diagnosis that has now been withdrawn. The facts point the other way, and her co-host's presence in the conversation made the point without anyone having to argue it. The community she spoke to still exists, Sigler still lives with the disease, and the experience Applegate described, of symptoms progressing without explanation, is one many people with undiagnosed conditions will recognize immediately. What has changed is only the name attached to her illness, and for now there is no name at all.

Applegate has been here in one sense before. She survived breast cancer after a 2008 diagnosis and a double mastectomy, and later had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed after learning she carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, People noted in its summary of her health history. The work ahead, as she described it, is an investigation: her doctors going back over what has happened since 2021, and why. Until it produces an answer, the most honest description of her situation is the one she gave her listeners herself. Back at square one, still sick, and unwilling to pretend that losing the wrong answer counts as finding the right one. Previously will follow updates from the podcast and her care team in its entertainment and news coverage.