Applegate Was Treated For MS For Five Years. She Doesn’t Have It.

The news came on her own show. On Tuesday, in back-to-back return episodes of the MeSsy podcast she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Christina Applegate said she does not have multiple sclerosis. She had taken a seven-month break from the podcast, she said, to process the news and deal with other health problems.

Applegate was diagnosed in 2021, after numbness in her feet, and announced the diagnosis that August. She has been treated for MS for roughly five years. Recalling the appointment through tears, she said her doctor “came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.’” Her own reaction, she said, was not the one in the room: “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.” No statement from her physician has been published; the misdiagnosis is her account, reported the same way by all three tabloids.

Nothing about her condition lifted with the label. “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better. 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.” She still uses a wheelchair at medical visits: “I can’t walk from the car to the room… Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS.’” She spoke about what the diagnosis had cost — “I lost everything. I lost my job… it stopped my life” — and about guilt toward the community she had become a face of: “I feel like I let everybody down… you and I became the poster children for MS. I had a reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don’t have a reason.” Sigler, who has lived with MS for more than twenty years, answered her on air: “You didn’t mislead anyone… what you shared doesn’t go anywhere.”

The next step, Applegate said, is what she called “an online investigation” by her doctors “to find out what has been going on since 2021.” No replacement diagnosis has been announced.

The doctors who weighed in made the same point from both sides of the story. Dr. Marwa Kaisey, a Cedars-Sinai neurologist who appeared as a guest on the podcast’s second episode, told People there is no single test for MS — “it’s a list of criteria” — and that nearly one in five people told they have MS do not, most of them having taken MS medication. Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz cited a 2019 study finding about one in five MS patients misdiagnosed, and another in which a third of 110 misdiagnosed patients carried the wrong diagnosis for ten years or more. Dr. Barbara Giesser of the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, who does not treat Applegate, told Page Six the same: there is no one single definitive test for multiple sclerosis.

Sources: People; Page Six; TMZ — all three carried the story this week; quotes from the MeSsy podcast as reported by each.