American actress Christina Applegate said on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, on MeSsy, the podcast she hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, that her doctor recently told her she does not have multiple sclerosis. The 2021 diagnosis, which she made public in August that year at 49, is withdrawn in her account. Withdrawal is not recovery: she repeated that the symptoms have not gone.

On her telling, the doctor came into the room and said, “Congratulations, you don’t have MS.” People around her were glad. She was not. “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better. I haven’t gotten better. If anything, I’ve gotten worse in some ways,” she told her co-host. She is, she added, back at square one, without a new explanation for what has been happening since 2021.

Applegate described the same picture she associates with MS: pain getting out of bed, exhaustion, a wheelchair at clinic visits, and, she said, an inability to walk from the car to the room. “Nothing magical happened when she said ‘You don’t have MS.’” She did not offer a replacement diagnosis. She said only that her doctors will now look into what has been going on for five years and why the tests then pointed to MS.

In 2021, she said, she was tested for a long list of conditions, with brain and spinal MRIs and a spinal tap. She was told she had relapsing-remitting MS, “on the low scale.” The doctor then showed her lesions on her brain — almost 40, on her figure — and that, at the time, became the answer to everything she was feeling.

Years of infusions followed, which she said wreaked havoc on her body. A couple of years ago her doctor wanted the infusion stopped and her B cells watched. The B cells did not change. That is when the diagnosis itself came under study. Applegate ties the recent conclusion to newer brain MRI technology, not to the illness disappearing.

Sigler has multiple sclerosis. The two built MeSsy on that shared ground. Applegate said she had become a public face of the disease, with her co-host, and that she now feels she has let the community down. She still counts herself part of it. She did not produce her own misdiagnosis statistic; she said only that, as it was explained to her, the error rate in MS is high even after years of treatment.

Variety notes that Applegate retired from acting after the finale of Dead to Me. In the episode she spoke about losing her job and about a life stopped by illness. She had been away from the podcast for months; her last regular appearance was in spring 2026. Two episodes went out on Tuesday. In the second, the hosts brought on Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor of neurology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, to talk about what comes next, not to announce a new diagnosis.

Applegate said that next week she starts, as a patient, looking for the right specialists. That is an intention she announced, not a programme already finished. Until then she remains, in her own words, with the same physical limits and without a new name for the illness.

Image: Christina Applegate at San Diego Comic-Con, 25 July 2014, Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. An event portrait, not the 2026 podcast studio.

Sources consulted: Christina Applegate Reveals She Was Misdiagnosed and Does Not Have MS: “I Haven’t Gotten Better … I’m Back at Square One” — The Hollywood Reporter; Christina Applegate Breaks Down in Tears Revealing She Was Misdiagnosed with MS: ‘I’m Back at Square One’ — People; Christina Applegate Reveals She Was Misdiagnosed With MS: ‘I’m Back at Square One’ and It’s a ‘Mindf—’ — Variety.