October 22, 2026
Robert Hanashiro/USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Christina Applegate says she was mistakenly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Here, she appears with Anthony Anderson during the 75th Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles in 2024.
Actor Christina Applegate revealed this week that she had been misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease that can lead to a range of health issues, including pain, fatigue and paralysis.
Applegate was given an MS diagnosis in 2021 after years of battling chronic illness. MS is an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system, often characterized as an autoimmune disease because it causes the immune system to attack the myelin sheath that protects nerve fibers.
The effects of MS vary from person to person. Applegate has explained that through the years her illness, which started with numbness in her toes that advanced up her legs, has caused chronic pain, gastrointestinal problems and trouble with balance and mobility – symptoms that have left her largely bedridden.
But on her podcast MeSsy, Applegate told podcast partner and friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played Meadow on "The Sopranos" and who also has MS, that a doctor told her that she actually does not have the neurological disease.
"She (the doctor) came into my room, and she said, 'Congratulations, you don't have MS,'" Applegate said on the podcast. "Well, I was not happy at all … You don't get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I'm better … I haven't gotten better."
And her experience of being misdiagnosed is not unique, Applegate said.
"There's a pretty damn high number of misdiagnoses with MS, and that's after people have been going through the process of it" and treatment for it for years, Applegate said. She added that she felt like she was "back at square one" in terms of trying to figure out what is wrong with her.
Despite ongoing research, MS has no distinct disease biomarker. This means that there is not one single test that can determine whether a patient has the disease.
Instead, doctors diagnose MS based on an array of factors, including assessment of symptoms, imaging tests and lab tests, which often include spinal taps to analyze cerebrospinal fluid, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
But symptoms of other conditions and diseases, including migraine, fibromyalgia and other neurologic conditions, can overlap with MS symptoms, leading to misdiagnosis.
A 2017 study found that nearly 30% of 400 patients referred to a health system for confirmation of an MS diagnosis went on to be determined to have other diseases or conditions. A 2016 study found that 50% of patients in four MS academic centers throughout the country had been misdiagnosed. And a 2019 study identified 18% of MS patients in two clinics had been misdiagnosed.
As seen with Applegate's case, misdiagnosis of MS can have "significant clinical and psychosocial implications."
Applegate received her MS diagnosis after scans showed lesions on her brain and analysis of spinal fluid detected signals of inflammation in the central nervous system.
Finding out she does not really have the disease has been upsetting and disorienting, Applegate said on her podcast.
"It's this weird feeling of like I became like this, you know, the poster child for MS," she said, noting that she at least had a "reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don't have a reason. And it's very unnerving, and it's really confusing for me."
