Christina Applegate says she was misdiagnosed with MS: ‘I haven’t gotten better’

(NEXSTAR) – Actress Christina Applegate has revealed that she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, putting her “back at square one.”

In a two-part episode return to her podcast, “MeSsy,” Applegate, 54, shared that her doctor “came into my room and she said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.'” She had taken time away from “MeSsy,” which she co-hosts with Jamie Lynn Sigler of “The Sopranos,” to process the news.

“I was like, not happy at all,” Applegate recounted in the episodes, released Tuesday. “Everybody else was happy.”

An MS misdiagnosis is “fairly common,” Dr. Marwa Kaisey, associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, said in the episode. She explained that roughly 20% of those diagnosed with MS don’t have the disease, and that diagnosis is difficult because there is no single test for the condition.

Applegate explained that she is still experiencing difficult symptoms, and it’s not clear what is causing them.

“I haven’t gotten better, Jamie!” she said. “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.”

Applegate revealed five years ago that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She made rare public appearances afterward, including in 2023 when she attended what she called “my last awards show as an actor probably.”

MS causes the protective covering of nerves to break down, the Mayo Clinic explains . How it impacts a person can vary, but in more severe cases, patients can lose the ability to walk or move at all. In others, there can be months or years between attacks, which is known as remission. MS has no cure.

In the wake of her diagnosis, Applegate described herself and Sigler, who has relapsing multiple sclerosis, as “the poster children of MS.”

“I had a reason. I had a f—— 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 really confusing for me,” she continued.

The actor added in the second part of the episodes released Tuesday that she had gone through “a great depression” because of her diagnosis.

“What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years … because it stopped my life,” Applegate said, explaining that she still has to use wheelchairs and struggles to walk. “Nothing magical happened when [the doctor] said, ‘You don’t have MS.’ Nothing magical happened.”