Tennis legend Monica Seles 'learning to live with a new normal' after being diagnosed with rare disease

 Seles was told she has myasthenia gravis (MG), a condition which causes muscle weakness, in 2022.

The 51-year-old has told the Associated Press she first noticed the symptoms of the disease while she was playing tennis.

The Serbian-American tennis great said: "I would be playing with some kids or family members, and I would miss a ball. I was like, 'Yeah, I see two balls'.

"These are obviously symptoms that you can't ignore.

"And, for me, this is when this journey started. And it took me quite some time to really absorb it, speak openly about it, because it's a difficult one. It affects my day-to-day life quite a lot."

Seles, who won her first major trophy at age 16 at the 1990 French Open and played her last match in 2003, also experienced weakness in her arms and legs and said "just blowing my hair out... became very difficult".

She said she had decided to speak publicly about her condition for the first time ahead of the US Open, which starts on 24 August, to raise awareness.

America's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke calls it "a chronic neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in the voluntary muscles" and "most commonly impacts young adult women (under 40) and older men (over 60)" but ... can occur at any age, including childhood".

It is an autoimmune disease - used to describe a condition where the body's immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy cells, tissues, and organs.

The US National Institutes of Health has said it affects around 1 in 5,000 people.

Seles, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2009, said she'd never heard of the condition until she saw a doctor about her symptoms and was referred to a neurologist.

"When I got diagnosed, I was like, 'What?!'," said Seles, who is partnering with argenx, an immunology company headquartered in the Netherlands, to promote their Go for Greater campaign which aims to help people with MG.

"So this is where - I can't emphasise enough - I wish I had somebody like me speak up about it."