Christina Applegate has been battling what she thought was multiple sclerosis since her diagnosis back in 2021. Now, she found out that she was misdiagnosed; she does not have MS, and whatever has been plaguing her remains a mystery. At first, that sounds like a horrible bit of doctoring by the medical professionals she’s been working with, but MS is a tricky thing to diagnose.
To be clear, it’s not like she’s been magically cured overnight just because she knows she doesn’t have MS. As she explained on her podcast “MeSsy,” she’s “back at square one” with the same debilitating health issues and no clue what’s causing it.
The fundamental issue with diagnosing MS is that no single, all-encompassing test exists. Doctors must follow a high-stakes neurological process of elimination. The autoimmune disease causes the body to attack its own nerve linings, which results in brain lesions, mobility loss, severe pain, blurred vision, numbness and tingling, bladder and bowel issues, muscle spasms; the list goes on and on… and just so happens to line up with a laundry list of other conditions including neuropathy and a variety of spinal issues.
To make things even trickier, many of these alternative ailments show up the same way on MRI: as a series of white spots.
Christina Applegate Says She Was Misdiagnosed With MS After Five Years of Treatment
Research has shown how easy it is to misdiagnose MS. A 2019 study found that about 18 percent of patients who were referred to specialist centers with an MS diagnosis didn’t actually have the disease at all. It wasn’t until 2024 that diagnostic guidelines began incorporating more advanced imaging techniques, such as searching for a “central vein sign,” a tiny blood vessel structure inside lesions that helps doctors differentiate MS from its lookalikes.
Women are statistically more likely to develop autoimmune conditions that are hard to diagnose, and that’s on top of the common and frustrating phenomenon of women having their physical symptoms brushed off as imagined, even by trained medical professionals. Without a single, unifying, definitive test to officially label someone as having MS, people like Applegate may find themselves spending years battling an illness it turns out they don’t even have.
The post Christina Applegate Doesn’t Have Multiple Sclerosis After All, and Doctors Still Don’t Know What’s Wrong appeared first on VICE.
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