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Since opening up about her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis for the first time in 2021, Christina Applegate has been outspoken about the way the disease affected her life while also working to others who share her diagnosis. But now, she’s making a shocking revelation: Despite her debilitating symptoms, Christina recently found out that she was misdiagnosed with MS and doesn’t have the disease at all.
After taking a hiatus from her MeSsy podcast, Christina returned this week to share the surprising news. How does something like this even happen?
Christina dropped this bombshell about her health on Tuesday.
Returning to the podcast on October 20, Christina shared the news in a conversation with her cohost, Jamie Lynn Sigler, who suffers from MS herself.
She explained that during an appointment, her doctor “came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.’ I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that Christina’s symptoms have disappeared — instead, she’s now seeking answers for why she feels the way she does all over again.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she said. “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?”
She said she’s gone through a ‘depression’ as she digests the news.
Christina said that because of MS, she’s “lost everything,” including her career.
“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.”
She also mentioned that she felt like she “let everybody down” in spending the last few years so dedicated to MS as both her diagnosis and an important cause.
“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,” she said. “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.”
Patients being misdiagnosed with MS is surprisingly common.
On the second part of the podcast episode that also dropped on Tuesday, Cedars-Sinai neurology professor Dr. Marwa Kaisey joined Christina and Jamie to talk about the misdiagnosis, which apparently happens more than some might think since there’s no definitive test for the disease.
“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,” Dr. Kaisey said.
This has to be a confusing and difficult time for Christina. Here’s hoping she finds the answers about her health that she’s looking for soon.
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