Dead to Me Star Opens Up About MS, 50th Birthday

Christina Applegate had a tough day on Thanksgiving
By Liz MacGahan,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 27, 2021 10:18 AM CST
Christina Applegate Talks About MS on her 50th
File photo of Christina Applegate arriving at the 25th annual Critics' Choice Awards in 2020. Applegate announced that she has multiple sclerosis over the summer, describing her diagnosis as a “tough road.”   (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

Christina Applegate turned 50 last Thursday, and she had a tough day. Not just because she had to share her milestone with a national holiday, but because living with multiple sclerosis was taking a toll that day. "Yup. I turned 50 today. And I have MS. It's been a hard one," she tweeted. “May we find that strength to lift our heads up. Mine currently is on my pillow. But I try,” she wrote in her tweet the evening of Nov. 25. Her friend and The Sweetest Thing costar tweeted support: “Loving you always. Always here,” Selma Blair wrote. Blair has MS, too. She first spoke publicly about her diagnosis in 2018 and is the subject of a documentary, Introducing, Selma Blair, which discusses her life with the disease. Applegate was diagnosed this year and first spoke out about it in August, People reports.

Applegate, star of Dead to Me, has faced more than one struggle with her health in the public eye. She had breast cancer and a double mastectomy in 2008 and also had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to prevent more cancer battles. Blair has said her MS is in remission. She had a hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation and has been noticing she feels better for about a year. “There’s still maintenance, treatment and glitches, and wonderful things,” Blair said of her prognosis, the AP reports. The disease is autoimmune—a patient’s immune system attacks the myelin, a fatty sheath that insulates nerve fibers, causing lesions and causing pain, vision loss, fatigue, and other symptoms. (More Christina Applegate stories.)

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