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Explainer | Selma Blair has it, now Christina Applegate too: MS, autoimmune disease with no cure whose cause is a mystery but whose treatment, say experts, keeps improving
- Christina Applegate recently revealed she has multiple sclerosis, and she’s not the only actress with the autoimmune disease that has no cure or definite cause
- Experts describe its symptoms and ways to treat it, while one MS ‘warrior’ describes how logging his disease in detail has helped him mitigate its flare-ups
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Christina Applegate, star of the Netflix series Dead to Me, is the latest celebrity to reveal she has multiple sclerosis.
Late last year, she disclosed she had joined a growing list of actresses diagnosed with the condition: Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, 41; Selma Blair, 50; and Buffy The Vampire Slayer star Emma Caulfield, 49.
The disease affects an estimated 2.5 million people in the world, a majority of them women.
Multiple sclerosis, or MS, is an autoimmune disease that results from the body’s immune system attacking healthy cells in myelin, the protective sheath of fats and proteins surrounding the ends of nerves.
With myelin damaged, the signalling system from your brain to other parts of your body is interrupted.
MS symptoms may include problems with vision first – experienced as a blurring or pain in one eye – as the protective myelin of the optic nerve is destroyed.
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