For more than five years, Christina Applegate believed she was living with multiple sclerosis (MS). The Sweetest Thing actress spoke about her pain, wrote a memoir and battled mental health as she tried living with MS.
But in October 2026, Christina revealed she had been misdiagnosed.
“I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me,” she said in an episode of her MeSsy podcast. “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better. If anything, I’ve gotten worse.”
Christina explained her doctor suggested ending the infusion treatment for MS to see how her body would respond. During which her body didn’t respond in the way that indicated she had MS. After further research, doctors concluded she did not have the autoimmune disease.
“She came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,’” she recalled, adding she was “not happy at all.”
According to Elena Grebenciucova, a neuroimmunology physician at Northwestern Medicine, research suggests roughly 15 to 20 percent of MS patients do not actually have the disease, per the BBC.
With MS, the immune system mistakenly attacks the central nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord and optic nerve, resulting in lesions which can be seen in a brain scan. Dr Grebenciucova told the publication that the lesions could be signs of a different health problem such as migraines, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and high blood sugar.
Christina was first diagnosed in August 2021, and has openly shared her journey since. In November 2024, she confessed she would “lay in bed screaming” from the sharp pains. As a result of her constant agony, Christina struggled with severe depression.
“It feels really fatalistic. I’m trapped in, like, this darkness right now that I haven’t felt [in], like, I don’t even know how long, probably 20-something years,” she admitted on her podcast.
“I don’t enjoy living; I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy things anymore.”
Her family, daughter Sadie Grace LeNoble and husband Martyn LeNoble, changed irrevocably from the medical complications.
“We got into a big thing the other day – and sorry Sadie, but it has to be said – she said, ‘I miss who you were before you got sick,’” Christina recalled on Kelly Ripa’s podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera, admitting her condition has “broken” Sadie.
“That is just like a knife to the heart because I miss who I was before I got sick too, very much so, every day of my life. It’s such a loss.”
Revealing on her MeSsy podcast, ““She didn’t know this. It was like losing the mum she had to this f*****g thing. And the more she’s gotten older now, I think the more it’s hurting her.”
Previously, doctors discovered 30 lesions on her brain, with her biggest one sitting behind her right eye and causing significant pain. “My hand starts to go weird and then I’ll get a seizure-y feeling sometimes in my brain,” she said on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert.
Diagnosed with MS or not, Christina continues to battle with an overwhelming amount of health issues. Naturally, the 54-year-old feels she will never work on-screen again.
