Christina Applegate, 54, told listeners of her podcast MeSsy that doctors have told her she does not have multiple sclerosis. Recorded with fellow actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, the two new episodes were posted to YouTube on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, and marked Applegate's first podcast appearance since March. She had publicly revealed her MS diagnosis in August 2021. Recounting the appointment at which the news was delivered, she said a doctor walked into her room and told her she did not have the disease, a moment that left her unhappy rather than relieved. Her friends and colleagues around her were delighted, she said, but she was not.
Applegate said the news did not improve her health. She still needs a wheelchair to get to her doctor's office and cannot walk from the car to the examination room, and she described her condition as possibly worse than before. She said she continues to experience the symptoms typically associated with MS, which is why the reversal has left her puzzled.
“Nothing magical happened when she said, 'You don't have MS.' Nothing magical happened.”
Her doctors are to continue examinations to establish what went wrong with the 2021 diagnosis and what is causing her symptoms. Applegate's symptoms first appeared in 2021 as numbness in her toes that spread up her legs, according to her account in the podcast, and numerous tests followed before the MS diagnosis.
Applegate described the MS label as the reason her days had been so hard, and said that she feels she has let people down after becoming a public face of the condition alongside Sigler, who also lives with MS. She said the diagnosis had stopped her life, and she described severe depression, the loss of her job and the loss of much else. Applegate retired from acting after she wrapped up her role in Dead to Me, and her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, was published in March.
“I lost everything. I lost my job.”
In the second episode, Marwa Kaisey, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said misdiagnoses of MS are frequent. She explained that no single test confirms the disease, unlike a pregnancy test, and that doctors instead work through a set of criteria before reaching a diagnosis. Kaisey put the share of people diagnosed with MS who do not actually have it at close to one in five. Applegate's case, in her telling, shows how the process can go wrong for patients who present with symptoms that look like MS, and her doctors have not yet explained the cause of those symptoms.
Pollar is free and carries no ads in the text. Its members keep it going.
Support PollarHealth & Education
Actor Christina Applegate told listeners of her podcast MeSsy that doctors have told her she does not have multiple sclerosis, the diagnosis she announced in 2021. She says her symptoms have not eased and that she now has no explanation for them.
AI text based on reports by 20 Minuten, The Guardian, N-tv and other publishers. Published .