Christina Applegate cried as she revealed stunning news in her return to her “MeSsy” podcast with Jamie-Lynn Sigler after a seven-month hiatus.
The “Dead to Me” actor shared in a pair of episodes released on Oct. 20 that her doctor told her she does not have multiple sclerosis, a diagnosis she first revealed in 2021. She and Sigler, who has MS, have shared their journey and struggles with the chronic nervous system disease on the podcast over the years.
“This may come as great news, but to me I’m back at square one. It’s hard to say that she came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,’” Applegate said through tears in part one of the “MeSsy” podcast. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Applegate, 54, stressed that the surprising change in diagnosis does not mean her health issues have been resolved.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she said. “I haven’t gotten better, Jamie. 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. And that’s going to be an online investigation that my doctors are going to get into and just to find out what has been happening since 2021. Why did this happen? I had every symptom of someone with MS. Every single one.”
Applegate has been open about sharing her life with MS, including talking about it on the “MeSsy” podcast and writing about it in her bestselling 2026 memoir, “You With the Sad Eyes.”
“It’s like I feel like I let everybody down, you know?” she told Sigler. “It’s this weird feeling of I became like — you and I — the poster children for MS, and all that I did for everything that I was doing. It’s like I had a reason. I 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.”
“You didn’t mislead anyone,” Sigler said.
Applegate has been grappling with what this new revelation from her doctor means.
“I’m just in the state of like shock right now, you know?” she said. “I’m still in shock, and I’m sitting here having slept all day yesterday feeling like absolute crap because of the heat. My legs aren’t working. You know, all the same stuff is happening to me. And yet I have this thing of like, ‘Well, you don’t have that, so you know, maybe you’re faking it.’ In my head I’m like, ‘What can I be doing differently?”
“What you’re feeling is real and you can’t take that away because you don’t have the MS diagnosis around it,” Sigler said.
In part two of the podcast, Sigler and Applegate welcomed Dr. Marwa Kaisey, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She shared that it’s certainly possible to be misdiagnosed with the disease.
“It’s fairly common,” Kaisey said. “That is not surprising to anyone who works at an MS clinic, but it is always surprising when I talk about it with people in the MS world. And the reason for that is we don’t have one single test for MS. 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.”
“Some of those criteria are still a little bit subjective, and those criteria change every seven or so years, and so you really have to stay on top of the latest,” she continued. “There’s room for error there.”
Kaisey said common MS symptoms, such as tingling or numbness in your feet, fatigue and brain fog, can be found in many other illnesses or conditions.
“So to distinguish MS from its mimics can be challenging, and doctors, even with the best intentions with the deepest looks at a case, can sometimes still get it wrong,” she said.
Kaisey acknowledged that for Applegate to have her MS diagnosis “taken away” after five years of thinking she had the disease can be “earth-shattering.”
“When I was diagnosed with MS, I’ve gone through a great depression because of it,” Applegate said tearfully in the second episode. “I lost everything. I lost my job. What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years? … I get really emotional because it stopped my life. I still have to use wheelchairs when I go to the doctor’s offices. 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.’”
“I guess I felt comfort in having a name,” she continued. “I felt comfort in having like an answer and a community.”
The “Anchorman” star publicly revealed she was diagnosed with MS in August 2021. She has repeatedly spoken about how the disease, which disrupts communication between the brain and rest of the body according to Mayo Clinic, affects her day-to-day life.