Christina Applegateis left with more questions than answers about her health.
More than five years after theMarried… with Childrenalumspoke out abouther battle with multiple sclerosis, shelearnedthat shewasmisdiagnosed.
“This may come as great news, but to me it comes as, like, I’m back at square one,” Applegate said on the Oct. 20 episode of her andJamie-Lynn Sigler‘sMeSsypodcast. Recalling her doctor’s visit, she added, “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.”
The 54-year-old emphasized that the confirmation of the misdiagnosis hadn’t changed how she’s continued to struggle physically, still regularly using a walking cane and experiencing pain and aches all over her body.
“I haven’t gotten better, Jamie,” she said. “If anything, I’ve gotten worse. So I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me. 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.”
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Christina Applegate Shares Photo of Herself With “Weird Spot” on Her Cheek Amid MS Battle
“I have every symptom of someone with MS,” she continued. “Every single one. Now, we both know that there are many things that mirror MS. Many different things.”
Applegate—mom to 15-year-old daughterSadiewith husbandMartyn LeNoble—shared insight into her mental health struggles after learning that she does not have the degenerative chronic autoimmune disorder.
“I’m sitting here having slept all day yesterday feeling like absolute crap because of the heat,” she said. “My legs aren’t working. All the same stuff is happening to me. And yet I have this thing of like, ‘Well, you don’t have that, so maybe you’re faking it’ in my head.”
TheDead to Meactress admitted that she also feels guilty since she had found immense support among others suffering from MS.
“I leaned into other friends,” shenoted. “I leaned into the community. I felt safe because I had a place to talk, which was here felt like, ‘OK, I have an answer. What a great thing. I may not get out of this. I might get worse, but I’m taking all the necessary precautions.'”
“It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down,” Applegate shared. “It’s this weird feeling because I became this, you and I: the poster children for MS. Everything I was doing, I had a reason. I had a f–king reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don’t have a reason. It’s very unnerving, and it’s very confusing for me.”
Sigler—who was diagnosed with MS in 2002 at age 20 while working onThe Sopranos—empathized with Applegate’s frustrations.
“It brings up an interesting point that we can talk about,” she said, “the labeling of things and how attached we become to them for so many reasons. It feels like there’s a road map, at least, that you have for things.”
“We’ve come to learn that this is not a rare occurrence,”Sigler continuedof medical misdiagnoses, “especially when it comes to MS.”
A 2019 study led by Cedars-Sinai found that nearly one in five patients with “an established diagnosis” were misdiagnosed.
Sigler, 45, also urged her co-host not to feel as if she’s at fault for her current situation.
“Everything you did and shared and were and are to so many people doesn’t go anywhere,” she added. “This new information that you have in your life, that doesn’t take away anything that you did. You didn’t mislead anyone.”
As Applegate continues her journey to find an answer, keep reading for a look back at what she had shared about her health battle.
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“Hi friends. A few months ago I was diagnosed with MS,” she shared on her social media channels that August. “It’s been a strange journey. But I have been so supported by people that I know who also have this condition. It’s been a tough road. But as we all know, the road keeps going. Unless some a–hole blocks it.”
“I noticed, especially the first season [of Dead to Me], we’d be shooting and my leg would buckle,” Applegate explained during a March 2024 interview on Good Morning America. “I really just put it off as being tired, or I’m dehydrated, or it’s the weather. Then nothing would happen for months, and I didn’t pay attention.”
By the time she was shooting the Netflix series’ third and final season, the actress said she was “being brought to set in a wheelchair.”
“I couldn’t move that far,” she recalled, “so I had to tell everybody because I needed help.”
And she’s not the only one experiencing strong feelings towards the illness. “In my situation, Sadie only knew me as healthy and a runner and a Pelotoner and a dancer—and she only knew that,” Applegate explained to friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler on an August 2025 episode of their MeSsy podcast. “So then when this came about in 2021, she was, like, stoic about it.”
Yet, “I see her look at me when I’m in bed,” Applegate continued, “and can’t quite move or, I want to go say goodnight to her in her room but I can’t quite get down the hallway for whatever reason my legs aren’t working that day.”
The whole experience has “broken” her teen, Applegate noted. “It was like losing the mom she had to this f–king thing. And the more she’s gotten older now, I think the more it’s hurting her.”
So, yes, she’s going to talk about the fact that she’s already purchased burial plots.
“My friend and I are going to go take a picnic there,” Applegate revealed on a March 2026 episode of NPR’s Wild Card. “It’s really pretty where it is.” She just has to pick out a tree “’cause it’s really sunny,” she continued. “And I want my visitors to not be sweating.”
Legions are caused by the immune system attacking the myelin sheath around nerves, according to the Multiple Sclerosis Trust.
“It sucks,” the Anchorman actress told late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel of her daily struggles with MS. “I’m not going to lie. I think anyone who has MS isn’t going to be like, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to me!'”
Besides, she’d taken that tack when discussing her breast cancer battle back in 2008. “I went out, and I was the good girl talking about ‘Oh, I love my new boobs’ that are all scarred and f–ked up. What was I thinking?” she said on Armchair Expert. “Everything I was saying was a freaking lie. It was me trying to convince myself of something, and I think that did no service to anyone.”
While she started a foundation and “raised millions of dollars for women to get MRIs who were at high risk,” she noted, “at the back of it, I was taking off my bra and crying every night. And I wish that I had said that.”
“But I might get to a place where I function a little bit better,” she added. “Right now, I’m isolating, and that’s kind of how I’m dealing with it—by not going anywhere because I don’t want to do it. It’s hard.”
“She said, ‘You need to get checked for MS,'” Christina recalled during her GMA interview. “If not for her, it could’ve been way worse.”
“I’m probably not going to work on-camera again, but I’m so glad that I went out with someone who is by far the greatest actress I’ve ever worked with in my entire life,” she said of costar Linda Cardellini, “if not the greatest human I’ve ever known.
“I woke up at three o’clock in the morning in a pool of s–t,” she explained on an April 2024 episode of her MeSsy podcast. “I didn’t know what happened, and having MS at three o’clock in the morning and trying to change your sheets, it’s not fun. But this brings me to my next point, which we can talk about: I’m wearing diapers.”
Their discussion was “so liberating,” her co-host Sigler noted. “This is something you do by yourself and it feels terrible when you’re doing it. I’ve done that hundreds of times in my MS journey through the years when I’ve experienced a flair or when I was sick.”
Three years into her diagnosis, she continued, “And I’m still sitting here like ‘Boohoo, woe is me.’ I’m still mad about it.” But the truth was, added, “I don’t enjoy living—I don’t enjoy things anymore.”
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At times, the discomfort even makes it hard for her to enjoy her one source of comfort, the reality TV that at times is “on 24/7 in my room,” she noted. But, “I can’t even pick up my phone sometimes,” Applegate added, “because now it’s traveled into my hands. So I’ll try to go get my phone or get my remote to turn on the TV or whatever, and sometimes I can’t even hold them.”
In the plus column, she noted, she has connected some of her gastro issues to her larger illness. “I have noticed that—and I’m going to be really honest—if I have to poop, I puke,” she detailed. “And when I puke, I get all the pain and then all the things happen.”
Mere months after her hospital confession, Applegate was checking back in. Returning from a family trip to Europe, “I’m like, ‘I wanna be admitted. I’m staying here because I want answers,'” she recounted that August of what she told staff. “‘I want every test that you can possibly think of or ones that you haven’t even thought of, and I want them done.'”
Following a middle-of-the-night CT, she learned, “I had kidney infections.”
“She came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,'” she recalled of her doctor’s visit in the October 2026 podcast MeSsy. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Applegate emphasized that the confirmation of the misdiagnosis hadn’t changed how she’s continued to struggle physically.
“I haven’t gotten better,” she said. “If anything, I’ve gotten worse. So I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me. 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.”
