Five years of treatment, advocacy and answers — built on a diagnosis her doctor now says was wrong. And the symptoms never left. Christina Applegate shared the news on her MeSsy podcast.
By Emily — The Insider, CelebnMusic247
Christina Applegate has spent five years as one of the most visible faces of multiple sclerosis in America. This week, she told the world the diagnosis itself was wrong.
In the Tuesday, Oct. 20 return episode of MeSsy — the podcast she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, back after a monthslong sabbatical and a hospital stay — Applegate, 54, revealed that doctors have determined she was misdiagnosed. Recalling the appointment, she said her doctor “came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.'” Everyone around her was thrilled. She was not.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better,” she said through tears. “I haven’t gotten better, Jamie. If anything, I’ve gotten worse in some ways. I’m back at square one. I don’t know what’s going on with me.”
That is the part of this story that matters most, and Applegate said it plainly: nothing about her daily life improved with the news. She described severe pain, difficulty walking, and needing a wheelchair for medical appointments. “Nothing magical happened when she said you don’t have MS,” she said. “Nothing magical happened.” What happens next, she explained, is “an online investigation that my doctors are going to get into, just to find out what has been happening since 2021. Why did this happen? I have every symptom of someone who has MS. Every single one.”
Her original diagnosis came in August 2021, after numbness that began in her toes spread through her legs. She underwent MRIs and a spinal tap, received the MS diagnosis, and spent years on infusion treatments — while becoming a prominent advocate for the MS community alongside Sigler, who was diagnosed with MS in 2001. Applegate admitted the reversal carries its own guilt: “I feel like I let everybody down.”
A neurology expert who joined the podcast’s follow-up episode put the mistake in context. Dr. Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor in the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, explained that there is no single test that confirms MS — diagnosis rests on a list of criteria — and that nearly 20 percent of people diagnosed with MS turn out not to have it, most of them having taken MS medication for years. Misdiagnosis, in other words, is “fairly common.” It just rarely happens to someone this public, who built part of her public life around the diagnosis.
Applegate has not announced any change to MeSsy, which is built around living with MS, and she has been clear that the search for her actual condition starts now. This piece reports only what she and her doctors have said: the MS diagnosis has been withdrawn, the symptoms are real and ongoing, and the cause is not yet known.
Christina Applegate: The 247 Take
The 247 Take — “Back at square one” is the most honest sentence in celebrity health news this year. Applegate didn’t get a miracle; she got her one certainty taken away, and she said so on mic instead of letting a publicist spin it into a recovery story. Five years of infusions, advocacy and identity were built on the wrong answer — and her first instinct was to apologize to the community she’d stood up for. Whatever her doctors find next, she has already done the hardest part in public: telling the truth while it still hurts.
More celebrity news at CelebnMusic247.com.
Sources: Entertainment Weekly | Reader’s Digest | AARP | USA Today
