Key Points
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Christina Applegate revealed she was tested for several new diseases after her multiple sclerosis misdiagnosis.
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The star said doctors evaluated her for “sister diseases” to MS.
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“It’s hard for me to try to shake that identity,” the Dead to Me and Anchorman star said.
Actress Christina Applegate has shared a major health update after revealing last month that she was misdiagnosed with the neurological condition known as multiple sclerosis.
The 54-year-old told her MeSsy podcast cohost, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, and media personality Jack Osbourne — both of whom have MS — that she’s still coming to terms with life after learning she doesn’t have the disease, which doctors first diagnosed her with in 2021.
“It’s hard for me to try to shake that identity because it’s been my identity for so long,” Applegate said on the episode (below), noting that symptoms (and treatments) for the disease are notoriously difficult to pin down. “My dad would say, ‘Why aren’t you doing what so-and-so is doing? They’re doing so much better than you?'”
Osbourne, son of the late rock legend Ozzy Osbourne, then asked Applegate for an update on where her diagnosis stands after a doctor informed her that she didn’t have MS.
“We’re going into square one, just doing some testing and going one-by-one of the sister diseases to MS,” she said, pointing to potential candidates like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Lyme disease, and more.
Applegate noted that “all these things can kind of mimic MS,” so she’s now “being tested for all that stuff slowly but surely” as she navigates her next steps.
In October, Applegate shocked her fans when she revealed that a recent round of testing indicated that she did not, in fact, have MS, despite doctors initially diagnosing her with the disease five years ago.
“This may come as great news, but, to me, it comes as I’m back at square one,” the star explained on the emotional MeSsy episode, adding that her doctor “came into my room and she said, ‘Congratulations! You don’t have MS.'”
She also said she’s “not happy at all” over the news.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed, and then all of a sudden I’m better. I haven’t gotten better,” noted the star. “I’ve gotten worse, in some ways. I’m back at square one. I don’t know what’s going on with me. That’s going to be an online investigation my doctors are going to get into to find out what’s been happening since 2021. Why did this happen? I have every symptom of someone with MS. Every single one. We both know that there are many things that mirror MS. Many different things.”
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She also told listeners that there’s “a pretty damn high number of misdiagnoses with MS,” while Dr. Marwa Kaisey of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s neurology department joined her later in the episode to inform her that misdiagnosing is “fairly common” because there’s not “one single test for MS” that can definitively prove the disease.
Listen to Applegate discuss her ongoing health complications in the podcast episode above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
