Christina Applegate says she was misdiagnosed with MS

Actress Christina Applegate said Tuesday she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, more than five years after she announced she had the disease.

Applegate, 54, shared the news in a double episode of her podcast MeSsy, which she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler and which discusses life with MS, CBS News reported. She said she had taken a break from the show in recent weeks to process what she had learned.

She said that a few years ago her doctor wanted to take her off an infusion treatment and watch how her B cells reacted. The cell count did not increase or decrease after the treatment stopped, which began what she called “kind of a study into my diagnosis.” Her doctor then told her she had never had MS.

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

Applegate first said in 2021 that she had been diagnosed. She said at the time she had a spinal tap and MRIs, and that scans showed lesions on her brain. She has described symptoms including numbness, poor balance and tingling in her limbs, and said in a 2022 New York Times interview that she could not walk without a cane. She used a wheelchair while filming the Netflix series Dead to Me, and the script was adjusted.

She said the news has not meant relief. “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” Applegate 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.” She said she still has debilitating symptoms that affect her daily life and mobility, and that she does physical therapy three times a week.

Her doctors will investigate what has been going on since 2021, she said, with that work beginning next week. Applegate said the news was unnerving and confusing, and that she felt “like I let everybody down” given her advocacy work after the original diagnosis.

Dr. Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor of neurology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said on the podcast that almost one in five people who are told they have MS did not actually have it. She said misdiagnosis is fairly common because there is no single test for the disease.

The announcement was among the most searched topics in Canada on Wednesday, according to Google Trends. Applegate’s own doctor was not named in the reports. The cause of her symptoms has not been identified.

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Source: CBS News, with additional reporting from ABC News and NBC News.