Celebrity4 min(s) read
Christina Applegate shares health update after MS misdiagnosis
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Christina Applegate has revealed that she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) telling fans she’s ‘back at square one’.
The Hollywood star revealed the tragic news on her podcast after a lengthy absence.
Christina Applegate gives sad update on her health
Returning to her MeSsy podcast after a seven-month absence, Applegate gave fans a shocking update.
Releasing back-to-back episodes with co-host Jamie Lynn Sigler, the Anchorman star revealed that she has taken time out from her podcast - on which the pair discuss living their respective lives with MS - to process the news from her doctor that she doesn’t actually have MS.
The 54-year-old has been told now that her symptoms, which she has been experiencing since 2021, are not actually MS at all.
However, despite admitting that her doctor thought this was ‘good news’ at first, there is another side to things, in that she now doesn’t know what is going on.
Tearfully explaining how she found out, Applegate said: “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.”
Dr Marwa Kaiser, from the neurology department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, joined them on the show to explain a bit more.
Basically, MS misdiagnoses are pretty common because there simply isn’t ‘one single test for MS’.
She continued: "It’s not like we have something like a pregnancy test that says, ‘Yes. You have it.’ ‘No. You don’t.’ It’s a list of criteria.”
Multiple sclerosis is too complicated for just one test
Almost 20 percent of those diagnosed with MS don’t have it, Dr Kaisey explained.
“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”
What’s more, it doesn’t just make the symptoms that Applegate had been experiencing go away - it just means that they can’t be explained.
Applegate said: "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, 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?”
In the second instalment of the podcast, she continued: "I’ve gone through a great depression because of it. But I lost everything. I lost my job. I lost - I’m sorry.
"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.
"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’s also now struggling with her perceived role within the MS community as an ambassador.
Where does that leave Applegate as an MS advocate?
The Dead To Me star said she feels as if she’s ‘let everybody down’ after the podcasters had become the ‘poster children’ for MS.
"I had a reason… as to why my day sucked every day," she said.
“Now I don’t have a reason and it’s very unnerving and it’s very confusing for me.”
Applegate said that she remains in a ‘state of shock’ about the whole thing, and doesn’t yet know how to ‘process’ it.
Still, she concluded, her health battle is ‘the same game with a different name’.
What exactly that name is, she’s not sure yet.