Christina Applegate Says She Doesn't Have MS After All. She's Still Sick.

The “Dead to Me” star told her MeSsy podcast she still has every MS symptom and no idea what's causing them.

Christina Applegate’s doctor walked into her room with what sounded like good news: “Congratulations, you don’t have MS.” Applegate didn’t hear it that way.

The “Dead to Me” star, 54, told the story Tuesday on “MeSsy,” the multiple sclerosis podcast she hosts with fellow actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who has spoken publicly about her own MS, ABC7 reported. She said she was misdiagnosed, that she still has every symptom of the disease and that she’s back at square one, with no name for what’s making her sick.

She went public with the diagnosis herself. On Aug. 10, 2021, Applegate opened a post to her 1.4 million Twitter followers with “Hi friends. A few months ago I was diagnosed with MS. It’s been a strange journey,” The Hollywood Reporter noted at the time, and then asked for privacy. As recently as March, ABC7 reported, she told ABC News’ Robin Roberts she still hadn’t accepted the diagnosis and called it a lifelong disease without a cure.

Now she’s lost the diagnosis without losing the illness. TheWrap reported that she described five years of chaos and infusions aimed at the wrong target, and said she’s worse in some ways, not better. It still hurts her to get out of bed, she said, and she still sleeps all the time.

Her rawest line was about meaning, not medicine. “I had a reason … as to why my day sucked every day, and now I don’t have a reason,” she told Sigler, according to TheWrap. She also said she felt she’d let everybody down, since she and Sigler had become the poster children for MS, ABC7 reported.

That loss shows up on the show itself. Applegate stepped away from the podcast to process the news, which she said threw her into a deep depression, and its Apple Podcasts listing shows the episodes before Tuesday’s as Sigler’s, with guests like Tiffani Thiessen. TheWrap noted she’d also spent weeks in the hospital in April. She came back to a show whose own description still names MS as the curveball life threw both hosts.

She has plenty of company, a Los Angeles neurologist said on the show. Dr. Marwa Kaisey, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said in a follow-up episode that her research found nearly one in five people are wrongly diagnosed with MS, ABC7 reported. Kaisey pointed to two culprits: there’s no single test for MS, and many of its symptoms turn up in other conditions too.

Applegate said her doctors will now dig into what’s been happening to her since 2021. Until they find it, the congratulations don’t change her trips to the doctor: she still can’t walk from the car to the exam room, she said, and still needs a wheelchair to get there.

Source: abc7.com, retrieved October 20, 2026. Other sources: The Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Apple.