Christina Applegate Returns to Her Podcast & Reveals She Was Misdiagnosed With MS

Oct 26, 2026 by apost team

Christina Applegate has spent five years talking publicly about living with multiple sclerosis. She built a podcast around it. She became one of the most recognizable faces of the condition. She helped people feel less alone in something she understood from the inside.

On October 20, 2026, she returned to that podcast after a seven-month absence — and told her listeners she does not have MS.

Applegate, 54, revealed in a two-part episode of “MeSsy,” the podcast she co-hosts with fellow actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, that new technology around brain MRIs had led her doctors to revise her diagnosis. In a tearful account, she described the moment her doctor delivered the news. “She came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.’”

Her reaction was not what anyone might have expected. “I was not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”

The reason is not hard to understand. She had been diagnosed in 2021. She had built five years of advocacy, identity, and community around that diagnosis — and a misdiagnosis, however good the news sounds in isolation, does not mean she is better. “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden, I’m better,” she said. “I haven’t gotten better. If anything, I’ve gotten worse in some ways.”

The podcast had gone on hiatus in March 2026. What Applegate shared on her return explained why. The previous year had included a hospitalization for a kidney infection — she recorded a podcast episode from the hospital — and a sustained period of worsening symptoms that culminated in the diagnostic review. She has been hospitalized multiple times. She returned with news that resolves nothing.

“I’m back at square one,” she said. “It’s a mindf---.”

The impact of the misdiagnosis on Applegate’s sense of herself as an advocate was something she addressed directly. She said she felt as though she had let people down — the MS community she had spoken for, the listeners who had connected with her experience, the people who had written to tell her that hearing her talk about what she was going through had made their own journey easier. Being told she does not have the condition she had been speaking about for five years is not, she made clear, a clean ending to anything.

“I’m still in this,” she said. “Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS.’”

Co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001 and has spoken about it publicly for decades, was present throughout the episode. The two women have built “MeSsy” around the specific experience of navigating a chronic illness diagnosis — not as a message of inspiration, but as a record of what it actually looks and feels like from the inside. That project did not end with the misdiagnosis disclosure. It got more complicated.

Applegate and her doctors are now working to establish what has been causing her symptoms since 2021 — the condition that presented as MS, progressed, and worsened, but was not, according to the new diagnostic technology, the disease they thought it was. She does not yet know what that condition is. She is, as she put it, at square one.

She has survived breast cancer. She went public with her MS diagnosis. She built a community. She was told the diagnosis was wrong. She came back to the podcast and said all of it out loud.

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Are you a fan of Christina Applegate? Do you think her decision to share this news so honestly with her listeners is one of the most remarkable things a public figure has done with their platform? Let us know in the comments and pass this on to your family, friends, and anyone who has followed her journey.