Christina Applegate Reveals She Was Misdiagnosed With MS

Actress Christina Applegate just revealed that her devastating diagnosis of multiple sclerosis was wrong all along.

The 54-year-old “Bad Moms” star became emotional during a recent appearance on her “MeSsy” podcast, which she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, while making the revelation that she was misdiagnosed with the chronic condition more than five years ago, per People. 

“She came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,’” Applegate said while crying on the show. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”

At another point, the actress called her misdiagnosis a “mindf*ck” and said she was in a “state of shock” about it.

Dr. Marwa Kaisey, associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, joined the episode and confirmed that MS misdiagnoses are “fairly common.”

Kaisey said, “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.”

“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,” Kaisey added.

Applegate said she was upset because she still has symptoms, but now she has no answers to what’s causing them.

“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” Applegate said during the podcast appearance. “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. 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?”

The “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” star told her story over the course of two episodes. On the second installment, she said, “I’ve gone through a great depression because of it. 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. 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 said now it’s awkward as she has become a major figure in the MS support community. 

“It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down,” Applegate said. “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.”

Applegate was originally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021. She had been on hiatus from her podcast for the past seven months. 

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