Christina Applegate says she’s “back at square one” after more than 5 years of believing she had a number of sclerosis (MS) — only for a physician to inform her she doesn’t.
“‘Congratulations. You don’t have MS,’ ” the “Dead to Me” actress, 54, recalled her physician saying. Yet she was “not happy at all” about the revelation.
“I’m back at square one, that I don’t know what’s going on with me,” she said Tuesday on her podcast, “MeSsy,” which she hosts with fellow actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who was identified with MS in 2001.
MS causes the immune system to attack the protecting masking on nerve fibers, disrupting communication between the mind and the relaxation of the physique. That disruption may become everlasting, and sufferers can lose the capacity to stroll on their own or transfer at all.
Misdiagnosis impacts more folks than you might think.
Christina Applegate speaks on stage with a cane at the 2024 Emmy Awards. WireImage
“Up to 1 in 5 patients diagnosed with MS may not actually have MS but a different condition,” Dr. Elena Grebenciucova, an MS and neuroimmunology doctor at Northwestern Medicine, advised The Post. “Symptoms of MS are not unique to MS.”
A misdiagnosis doesn’t just confuse and misery sufferers. Shortly after being identified with MS, sufferers typically begin therapies that suppress the immune system to sluggish long-term incapacity development.
Improper therapy can cause extreme damage and pointless well being dangers.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better,” Applegate said. “I haven’t gotten better, Jamie. If anything, I’ve gotten worse in some ways.”
Here’s how an MS misdiagnosis can happen — and the next steps Applegate is taking to determine the appropriate cause of her well being woes.
What are Applegate’s signs?
Applegate reported first experiencing a tingling sensation in her toes in early 2021 that progressively led to “insane tingling” from her “butt down.”
She also felt her leg buckling while capturing scenes for Netflix’s “Dead to Me.”
She required a wheelchair during the 2021 filming and has walked with a cane since.
“My knees feel like I have bricks attached to them, heavy and painful,” Applegate famous as she mirrored on her signs. “When I put my feet down on the ground when I wake up, it feels as if the floor is made of needles, yet I can’t feel them because my feet are completely numb.”
She detailed other struggles in her 2026 memoir, “You With the Sad Eyes.”
“When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger,” she wrote.
“My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony.”
What are the signs of MS?
MS, which is believed to have an effect on almost 1 million Americans, might begin with imaginative and prescient issues (such as double imaginative and prescient, ache with eye motion or imaginative and prescient loss), muscle weak point (typically in the arms and legs), muscle stiffness and muscle spasms. This can lead to clumsiness and issue balancing.
It could also manifest as tingling, numbness or ache in the limbs, stomach or face; loss of bladder management; and/or dizziness. There can also be cognitive and emotional modifications: issues concentrating and issue with emotional expression and management.
Applegate was identified with MS in 2021. Getty Images for Critics Choice Association
Over time, muscle weak point and ache can have an effect on strolling or standing or lead to paralysis.
About 20% to 40% of MS circumstances progress steadily, with some durations where the illness doesn’t get worse.
Relapses are adopted by quiet durations where the illness is in “remission” that can last months or years.
However, most folks have another kind: relapse-remitting MS, where new signs or “relapses” emerge over days or weeks, then enhance or disappear utterly.
What steps is Applegate taking to get the correct analysis?
Anyone who believes they might have been misdiagnosed with MS should go to an MS specialist.
“It’s important to talk to a neuro-immunologist at an academic center to review whether this is autoimmune and what other mimics of MS may have not been investigated,” Grebenciucova said.
Applegate said on her Tuesday podcast episode that her docs are embarking on “an online investigation … to find out what has been going on since 2021, why did this happen?”
Dr. Marwa Kaisey, an affiliate professor of neurology at Cedars-Sinai in LA, said on the podcast that it’s crucial to discover the cause of Applegate’s irritation.
“The next steps are to try to get them an answer as to what’s actually going on, and that looks different in each patient,” Kaisey defined.
“For someone like Christina, who has these bands in her spinal fluid [the diagnostic hallmark that was the basis for her MS diagnosis], there’s probably something causing inflammation within her central nervous system, so that’s the road that you might go down and look for things that might be inflammatory causes.”
Rheumatoid arthritis, a power autoimmune situation, is being explored, Applegate said on the podcast. Her rep had no further remark to The Post.
Which situations are typically mistaken for MS?
Many illnesses manifest signs comparable to MS, which are called “MS mimics.”
“For example, tingling or blurry vision can occur due to dozens of other diagnoses. Imbalance, likewise, can occur due to a variety of conditions,” Grebenciucova said.
Applegate said her docs reevaluated her MS analysis and decided she didn’t have it. Getty Images
Because there is no single check that can determine MS, sometimes the only means to determine it is to rule out other prospects.
This consists of autoimmune issues like acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Sjögren’s syndrome, myasthenia gravis (MG) and sarcoidosis.
Lyme illness, human T-cell lymphotropic virus-1 (HTLV-1) and syphilis that spreads to the mind are a few infectious illnesses that can look like MS. Stroke, ALS, muscular dystrophy, hypothyroidism, hypertension and many other mimics add to the chaos.
To make issues even more difficult, MS seems very totally different between folks and can even range in the same particular person over time.
Because beginning medicine for MS early makes such a massive distinction — if the affected person truly has it — strain to shortly set up a analysis could also enhance misdiagnoses.
What are pink flags of misdiagnosis?
When sufferers present options outside a typical MS case (called “red flags”), a new analysis isn’t always made.
Experts say this may be because many MS docs typically encounter uncommon MS circumstances and think about them a half of the spectrum of the illness.
Plus, when sufferers switch or get referred to a new physician, that supplier may just settle for the earlier analysis with out query. Also, docs are human too: they may not need to admit they’re flawed.
According to the National MS Society, bilateral imaginative and prescient loss, seizures, headache, abrupt onset of signs and hiccups lasting more than a month are some of the pink flags that could point out an MS analysis is truly something else.
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