Christina Applegate Says MS Diagnosis Was Wrong, Back to Square One

Christina Applegate built the last five years of her public life around one diagnosis. On Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, she told listeners of her podcast MeSsy that the diagnosis was wrong. She does not have multiple sclerosis.

Applegate, 54, shared the news in a two part episode of the podcast she hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who does have MS. She said she learned the truth from her doctor during a hospital stay earlier this year, a stay that lasted several months and took her away from the podcast. "She came into my room and said, 'Congratulations, you don't have MS.' I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy," Applegate said, through tears.

Back at square one

Her point was plain. Losing the diagnosis did not make her well. "You don't get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I'm better. I haven't gotten better," she said. "If anything, I've gotten worse in some ways. So I'm back at square one, that I don't know what's going on with me."

Applegate first shared an MS diagnosis in August 2021. She has said her first symptom was numbness in her toes, which spread to her legs. On the Oct. 20 episode she said it hurts to stand up and that her current symptoms include fatigue, adding that she is "sleeping all the time." She said she has "every symptom of someone with MS," including weakness, pain and trouble walking. Her doctors now have to work out what has actually been happening since 2021. "I had a reason as to why my day sucked every day," she said. "And now, I don't have a reason, and it's very unnerving and it's really confusing for me."

She also spoke about guilt. Applegate and Sigler had become, in her words, "poster children for MS," and she said she felt she had let everybody down. Sigler told her she had done nothing wrong and had not misled anyone.

A misdiagnosis doctors say is not rare

In the second part of the episode, Applegate and Sigler spoke with Dr. Marwa Kaisey, a neurologist and associate professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Kaisey said MS is "fairly common" to misdiagnose because "we don't have one, single test for MS" and its symptoms are "very common in other things that are not MS." She cited a study of new MS patients that found "almost one in five of these people who'd been told they had MS, some for decades, didn't actually have it," and said most of them had been taking MS medication.

Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system attacks myelin, the sheath that covers nerve fibers, and interrupts communication between the brain and the body, according to the Mayo Clinic. Symptoms can include numbness, trouble walking and fatigue, a list that overlaps with many other conditions. That overlap is the heart of the problem: the disease is identified from a pattern of criteria, not from one test that answers yes or no.

Why this landed so hard

Applegate did not treat her diagnosis as private. She finished the final season of the Netflix series Dead to Me after the 2021 diagnosis, launched an online platform called Next in MS for people living with the disease, and wrote a memoir, You with the Sad Eyes. She was a public face of the illness. That is why a correction, which sounds like good news, arrived for her as a loss. Gina Moffa, a grief and trauma therapist in New York City, told USA Today that on paper a misdiagnosis is "good news," but a diagnosis, even a hard one, gives a person something to hold and a sense of direction. "In a lot of ways, you're somewhere harder, because now you're still struggling and suffering, and you've lost the map," Moffa said.

Applegate has been through a public health fight before. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and had a double mastectomy. After learning she carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, which raises the risk of breast and ovarian cancer, she later had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed.

What happens next

There is no replacement diagnosis yet, and Applegate did not offer a timeline for getting one. She said her doctors will investigate what has been going on since 2021 and why it happened. Until that work produces an answer, she is living with the same symptoms she had last month, minus the name she had organized her life around. The next update, when there is one, will come from her and her doctors, not from speculation about what else the symptoms might mean.