Former NFL, UK football star Art Still working to shine spotlight on rare heart disease

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 20, 2025) — Art Still is one of the best defensive ends in University of Kentucky football history, becoming the No. 2 overall pick in the 1978 NFL draft and playing in the NFL for 12 years — 10 of them with the Kansas City Chiefs. But speaking by phone recently from his Kansas City home, Still’s mention of football is secondary to a subject he is just as committed to as his time on the gridiron.

In September 2023, Still was diagnosed with ATTR amyloidosis, a rare disease that occurs when a protein called amyloid builds up in organs making the organs not work properly. While there are many types of amyloidosis, Still’s condition is hereditary and often affects the nerves, heart and kidneys.

For Still, now 69, the diagnosis was “eye-opening” but also in many ways a relief.

“For years, I had shoulder and knee aches and pains and started having heart issues and also carpal tunnel but none of it seemed related and I just thought it was from years of my body taking a pounding on the football field,” Still said.

Still participates in a medical evaluation by the NFL Players Association every five years where he undergoes scans of his body and some routine testing. It was during his most recent exam in August 2023 that he was urged to get more testing. Still says the physicians were baffled that despite his healthy diet, exercise and lifestyle, the very fit former athlete had atrial fibrillation (AFib), a condition which makes the upper chambers of the heart beat irregularly.

After returning to Kansas City, Still met with Brett Sperry, M.D., a cardiologist and director of the cardiac amyloidosis program at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute.

It was there that tests confirmed that Still had amyloidosis, a disease that is often hard to diagnose and mostly impacts men’s health. Still also learned people of African descent appear to be at higher risk of carrying a genetic mutation associated with the type of amyloidosis that can harm the heart.

“I had never heard of amyloidosis until it touched my life and unknowingly the lives of my family,” Still said. “But now that I know that early diagnosis is key to supporting those with it, I want to do everything I can to bring awareness to the disease.”

So, Still’s mission began and for the past year-and-a-half he has worked diligently not only to learn everything he can about the disease, but to tell everyone he can about it.

“I’ve come to appreciate that you can have a rare disease like this that you don’t have any control over,” he said. “As a patient, it’s important that you have learn to understand the disease and advocate for yourself and tell others who you may be able to help through early detection and treatment.”

Since his diagnosis, Still has been quite the force in bringing awareness to the disease using his platform as a former NFL player, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame inducted in 2015, and as a UK alum and former Wildcat football player.

“I grew up in Camden, New Jersey, and playing football was my way to get to college and that led me to the University of Kentucky and some of the most important years of my life that helped set me on the path for all of my future success,” Still said. “I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities I was afforded by going there and especially the people that I met along the way. While this disease is affecting my personal family, I'm just as passionate to get this information out to my University of Kentucky family and the Lexington community.”

Still’s urgency for letting others know about amyloidosis initially started much closer to home. Once he began talking with doctors more and thinking back on his family’s health history, it became clear that many people in his family had similar symptoms.

Among those suffering from the same disease in his family is his brother James “Sparky” Still, a former University of Maryland basketball player, whose condition progressed to him needing a heart transplant. “Watching what he has been through has been very difficult and now we know that early detection and treatment could keep other family members from having to get to the point of needing a transplant,” he said.

Still and his wife Liz have 11 grown children and their 26th grandchild is on the way. Helping them and others to learn more about the disease and most importantly — getting early detection — is his main focus these days. But beyond his family, he also wants to bring awareness to the rare disease that is often difficult to diagnose due to the myriad of seemingly unrelated symptoms that disproportionately impact African American men.

Through his own early detection and proactive treatment, he hopes to avoid a heart transplant.

“Finding out you have the disease through testing and early detection and getting treatment as the disease advances is really the key,” he said. “There isn’t a cure but if you know how to prevent the progression of it, you can make a big difference in living a healthy life.”

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At UK HealthCare, the UK Gill Heart & Vascular Institute offers comprehensive care for cardiac amyloidosis in the Bluegrass region, including treatment options unavailable anywhere else in Kentucky. Sonu Abraham, M.D., is an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist, who along with her colleagues, Andrew Kolodziej, M.D, Maya Ignaszewski, M.D., and nurse practitioner Anna Sketch have treated close to 100 patients with the varying types of the disease.

“Diagnosis is often delayed because the symptoms affecting different parts of the body can seem unrelated,” Abraham said. “One of the associated signs is when people have carpal tunnel in both hands.”

When patients are referred to UK, the first steps are to determine which type of amyloidosis the patient has, which is determined through blood tests and a PET scan. It is important to identify the type of amyloidosis. AL amyloidosis develops when bone marrow cells malfunction and create an abnormal surplus of light chains. This condition may arise on its own or be triggered by specific blood or immune system cancers, Abraham said. Transthyretin is a protein that transports certain chemicals throughout the body, and when it misfolds and deposits in various organs, including the heart, it can lead to ATTR amyloidosis.

If the patient has a hereditary form of the disease, which can be detected earlier by way of genetic testing and predominantly in African Americans, then members of the patient’s family are urged to get screened so that if they also have the disease, treatment and preventive measures can begin.

Although there is no cure for amyloidosis, early detection and treatment to prevent progression, which includes several newer medical therapies, are available at UK to treat the disease.

Symptoms of amyloidosis include both cardiovascular signs and others that seem as if they are unrelated, such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Cardiac amyloidosis symptoms may include:

• Abdominal bloating
• Abnormal heart rhythms, including atrial fibrillation
• Dizziness or fainting, also called presyncope and syncope
• Enlarged veins in the neck
• Fatigue, or extreme tiredness
• Nausea
• Numbness or tingling in the feet or hands
• Shortness of breath, also called dyspnea
• Swelling in the ankles, feet and legs, also called edema
• Symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome
• Ruptured biceps tendon
• Back pain related to lumbar spinal stenosis

Risk factors for cardiac amyloidosis include:

• Having a family history of cardiac amyloidosis or heart failure
• Being male
• Being 50 or older

The hereditary type of ATTR cardiac amyloidosis is more common among people of Afro Caribbean, Irish, Japanese, Portuguese or Swedish descent.

For more information about amyloidosis, go here.