Christina Applegate 'back at square one’ as star reveals she was misdiagnosed in devastating health update
Christina Applegate has said she now doesn’t ‘have a reason’ as to why her ‘day sucked every day’ after being given a shock misdiagnosis of MS.
The actor has been told she does not have multiple sclerosis (MS), despite years of debilitating symptoms and being hospitalised earlier this year following health issues.
Applegate was diagnosed with the condition back in 2021 and following this, she announced she would be stepping away from appearing on-screen, with Netflix series Dead to Me being one of her last major gigs.
The disease impacted her ability to perform in the final season, released in 2023, and she has been very open about it.
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But speaking on her MeSsy podcast with Jamie-Lynn Sigler - where the pair discuss their life with MS - today (20 October), the 54-year-old explained her doctor told her that after all these years, she does not have it.
“She came into my room and said, 'Congratulations, you don’t have MS',” the Anchorman actor recalled. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Applegate and Sigler were joined by Dr Marwa Kaisey for the second episode of the back-to-back drop, an associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology.
She explained that MS misdiagnoses are ‘fairly common’, with 20 percent of those diagnosed reportedly turning out to not have the disease.
Dr Kaisey said this is due to: “We don’t have one single test for MS. 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.”
And Applegate pointed out that learning she has been misdiagnosed doesn’t mean she isn’t still suffering.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” the star said.
Having not got any better, she said that if anything, she’s ‘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?” Applegate continued.
The actor was very emotional during the podcast, explaining she has gone ‘through a great depression’ because of her condition and ‘lost everything’.
“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.”
She also added that she feels as if she's 'let everybody down', saying: "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... 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."
Applegate is still in a ‘state of shock’ about this misdiagnosis and now views her health journey as ‘the same game with a different name’.
Topics: Christina Applegate, Celebrity News, Entertainment, Health
Jess Battison