Christina Applegate Undergoing Tests for Lupus & Lyme Disease After MS Misdiagnosis

Christina Applegate and her doctors are still searching for answers after revealing last month that she’d been misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).

The Dead To Me star shared the news last month on the MeSsy podcast, which she hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Applegate said she’d been absent since March while processing the news that she doesn’t have MS, despite experiencing debilitating symptoms since 2021.

On the latest edition of the podcast, Applegate told Sigler, who has lived with relapsing MS for nearly 25 years, that she is back to “square one” and “doing some testing and going one by one of kind of the sister diseases to MS.”

“You’ve got RA [rheumatoid arthritis] and you’ve got lupus and Lyme disease and all these things that kind of can mimic MS,” the Anchorman actress explained, per The Daily Mail. “So now I’m being tested for all that stuff slowly but surely.”

Lupus is a condition in which the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues and organs, causing inflammation that can affect joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, brain, heart, and lungs, per the Mayo Clinic. Rheumatoid arthritis is another autoimmune condition that causes joint inflammation.

Lyme disease, meanwhile, is a bacterial infection usually passed to humans from a tick bite. If not treated, it can lead to arthritis in large joints.

Applegate has not been officially diagnosed with any of the conditions mentioned above, but she continues to undergo tests to get to the bottom of her physical condition.

She also opened up about the difficulty of no longer identifying herself as someone with MS after living as one with almost six years. “It’s hard for me to try to shake that identity because it’s been my identity for so long,” she said, adding that she remains in physical pain despite the misdiagnosis.

“If there’s something I can be doing to feel better, because I don’t have the stigma of MS or I don’t have, you know, the criteria of that, whatever that is, please let me know,” Applegate stated. “I am wanting the advice right now. Before it was like, no.”

In last week’s podcast, Applegate admitted she was scared and confused about the situation and felt like she “let everybody down.”

“You and I [are] the poster children for MS,” she told Sigler. “And everything I was doing, I had a reason. I had a f***ing reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don’t have a reason and it’s very unnerving and it’s very confusing for me.”