Former NFL QB Reveals How He Pushed Through Liver Disease

Published: September 17, 2025

By Mallory Mattingly

Former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino got candid about his liver disease diagnosis in 2007.

“I wasn’t really working out as much as I should — because I used to work out when I played all the time and I kind of got away from that a little bit,” Marino admitted to PEOPLE.

“Those are the things I kind of noticed,” he explained. “Then they told me I had a fatty liver. I had MASH.”

Marino was diagnosed with MASH, Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatohepatitis, which “happens because you have excess fat cells in your liver. This condition was once called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NASH). Excess fat cells cause chronic inflammation that can lead to worsening liver damage. MASH is often associated with being overweight, high blood lipids and high blood sugar,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.

The doctors told Marino that the disease is “reversible, it can be taken care of, but, mainly for me, they were saying, like, ‘You gotta work out. You got to lose weight,’” he explained.

Marino joined Novo Nordisk’s Unordinary Stories campaign, which is a place for athletes to share their health stories.

“Novo Nordisk is a company that I wanted to get involved with because they’re trying to make a difference,” the former athlete told Fox News Digital. “There’s one in 20 Americans that have fatty liver disease, MASH, and 15 million Americans have that. It’s an awareness campaign to basically make people aware to go see your doctor, and it’s something that’s manageable.”

To push through his diagnosis, Marino leaned on lessons he learned while playing in the NFL for 17 seasons.

“There’s one thing I always take away from football, athletics and sports: that’s being positive,” he explained. “Look forward and look for answers and see what you can do and how you can be the best you can be. I would say I understood this is an issue; they let me know. But the biggest part is that it is manageable and it’s dealing with that.”

“Once again, having that great attitude and doing the things you need to do to take care of yourself. There are a lot of examples of that in everybody’s life, there really are.”

He also manages his diagnosis through healthy eating habits and exercise.

Marino joined the Baptist Health HealthTalk podcast and shared about how men “sometimes try to be tough” to the point where their health then suffers.

“Don’t be that guy that’s gonna say, ‘You know what, I’ll do it next year, I’ll do it next year, I’ll do it next year.” You know, when the time’s right, do it. Get your screening because it could save your life,” he urged.