Christina Applegate, 54, Reveals She Was Misdiagnosed With MS: ‘I’ve Gotten Worse’
The 'Dead to Me' star said she's starting 'back at square one'
Key Takeaways
- Actress Christina Applegate, 54, says doctors told her she does not have MS.
- The actress says her debilitating symptoms persist and have gotten worse over time.
- Applegate says she is 'back at square one' as doctors investigate her symptoms.
Actress Christina Applegate, 54, broke down in tears as she shared a stunning health update with fans: After going public with a multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis in 2021, she now says she was misdiagnosed—and five years later, she’s still searching for answers about what’s really been happening to her body. Here’s everything we know about Applegate’s health and MS misdiagnosis.
Does Christina Applegate have MS?
The Married… With Children actress returned to the MeSsy podcast on October 20, alongside cohost Jamie Lynn Sigler, 45, who has lived with MS since 2002. The two were joined by Marwa Kaisey, MD, an associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, for a candid conversation about MS misdiagnoses.
“[My doctor] came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,'” Applegate said on the podcast. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Dr. Casey explained that being misdiagnosed is “fairly common” because “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,” she said. “Almost one in five of these people who’d been told they had MS, some for decades, didn’t actually have it. And a majority of them were on medication to treat their MS.”
After her MS misdiagnosis, Applegate says ‘I’m back at square one’
For Applegate, the news didn’t bring relief. The symptoms that have upended her life for years are still there—only now, there’s no name for them.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she said on the podcast. “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.”
She described falling into a “great depression” after learning the diagnosis she’d built her life around was wrong.
“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,” 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.”
Christina Applegate’s health journey, from her MS diagnosis to now
While the MS diagnosis ultimately proved to be incorrect, Applegate said she first noticed something was wrong in 2021. “It was literally just tingling on my toes,” she told ABC News in March 2024. “And by the time we started shooting [the final season of her Netflix show Dead to Me with Linda Cardellini] in the summer of that same year, I was being brought to sit in a wheelchair. Like, I couldn’t walk that far.”
It was her longtime friend Selma Blair, 54, who was diagnosed with MS in 2018, who first urged her to get tested. “I was sitting in Selma’s living room, our children playing, and I told Selma I’d been having this weird tingling in my feet. She said, ‘You must get tested for MS,'” Applegate told British Vogue in May 2023.
In the years that followed, Applegate was candid about how debilitating her symptoms had become. “For three years since I was diagnosed, I’ve been in the hospital upwards of 30 times,” she shared on her podcast. In November 2024, she described losing function in her hands: “I can’t even pick up my phone sometimes…I can’t open bottles now. I just lay in bed all the time.”
In her memoir You With the Sad Eyes, published in March, she wrote: “When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger. My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony.”
She was hospitalized again in late March, and in August revealed she’d been treated for a serious kidney infection requiring IV antibiotics.
Amidst her MS misdiagnosis, Applegate says she’s ‘a strong chick’
Applegate said her MS misdiagnosis has left her in a “state of shock”—and feeling, strangely, as if she let people down.
“It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down,” she shared on her podcast. “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***ing 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.”
Still, she’s holding on to hope. “Health issues are a constant for me, but I’m a strong chick and I’m getting stronger and better every day,” she wrote on Instagram in April. “I’m taking a moment to focus on my health, but I’ll be back with more to say soon enough.”
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