Christina Applegate said Tuesday that she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, more than five years after she announced she had been told she had the chronic disease.
The 54-year-old actress shared the news in a double episode of MeSsy, the podcast on which she and co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler discuss life with MS. Applegate had stepped away from the show in recent weeks, and she said she used that time to process the news.
According to Applegate, her doctor decided a few years ago to take her off an infusion treatment and watch how her B cells responded.
The count neither rose nor fell after the treatment stopped, which she said began what amounted to a study of her diagnosis. Eventually her doctor delivered the verdict: she had never had multiple sclerosis.
“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.”
Her symptoms have not gone away. Applegate said she still lives with debilitating symptoms that affect her daily life and mobility, and she does physical therapy three times a week.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she 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 her doctors will begin an investigation next week to find out what has been happening to her since 2021.
When she was first diagnosed, she said, she underwent tests including a spinal tap and MRIs, and the scans showed lesions on her brain.
MS is a disease in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system.
Dr. Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor of neurology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said on the podcast that almost one in five people told they have MS “didn’t actually have it.” She called misdiagnosis “fairly common” because there is no single test for the condition.
Applegate has previously described numbness, an off-balance feeling and tingling in her limbs.
In a 2022 interview with The New York Times she said she could not walk without a cane, and she used a wheelchair while filming the Netflix hit “Dead to Me.” In 2023 she said her symptoms might lead her to give up acting on camera.
After her diagnosis she became an outspoken advocate for people with MS. On Tuesday she said the misdiagnosis left her feeling “like I let everybody down.”
“It’s very unnerving and it’s really confusing for me,” she said.
