Afghan Hound
Afghan Hounds have a cited life expectancy of 11.1 years (McMillan 2024 / VetCompass, n=380, 95% CI 10.5 to 11.8). No tested variant is carried by one percent or more of the 37 Afghan Hounds tested (Donner 2023). That describes the variants tested, not the breed's health. 21 dogs stand behind the atlas figures here, so treat this page as an early sketch.
Also known as Balochi, Ogar Afgan, Barakzai Hound, Eastern, Greyhound/Persian, and Kochyano Spay, Sage.
What genetic diseases do Afghan Hounds carry?
From a panel of 250 Mendelian-disease variants screened in 1,054,293 dogs (Donner et al. 2023), Afghan Hounds carry one of them at observable frequency. Carrier frequency is not clinical risk. Most recessive variants require two copies for disease expression; many dominant variants show incomplete penetrance. Read this as a population fingerprint of what's in the gene pool, not a per-dog prediction.
IGFBP5what this gene does
IGFBP5 is a gene that helps regulate growth factors involved in tissue development and repair.
For your dog: If you have a sighthound, it’s worth mentioning IGFBP5-related risks to your vet, but being a carrier doesn’t mean your dog will develop the syndrome.
Other names
The Afghan Hound is also recorded as Balochi, Ogar Afgan, Barakzai Hound, Eastern, Greyhound/Persian, Kochyano Spay, Sage, Tazhi Spay, Da, and Tazi.
Identified as Afghan Hound (VBO:0200004) in the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (Mullen et al. 2025, CC-BY 4.0) · registry IDs FCI 228 · iDog 2 · VeNom 14121.
For researchers Population genetics, disease models and every recorded condition Open the research detail for the Afghan Hound
In the atlas, the Afghan Hound clusters consistently as Afghan Hound (100% of the 21 dogs here). Dogs here sit in a relatively sparse region of the atlas, fewer close neighbors than typical.
Only 21 dogs of this breed in the atlas, modestly sampled.
What the atlas genotypes say about Afghan Hound
Computed from the 14,478 CanVAS dogs in the Atlas, on an imputed genotype backbone: 77,215 directly typed sites per dog, imputed to 9.67 million variants.
The confidence below counts dogs, not reads: it is the size of the sample, and it is separate from how the genotypes were measured.
What does genetic diversity mean?
How varied a breed's gene pool is — the share of gene spots where a typical dog of the breed carries two different versions rather than two identical ones.
How to read it: Higher = more diverse. Among well-sampled breeds it ranges roughly 0.22 (least diverse) to 0.33 (most diverse).
Diversity is a strength, not a verdict on any individual dog. Lower diversity means it's worth paying attention to recessive-risk testing — not that a dog is doomed.
What does within-breed variation mean?
How much individual dogs within the breed differ from each other genetically.
How to read it: Higher = more internal variety among individuals of the breed.
Sensitive to how many dogs of the breed we've sampled.
What does typical lifespan mean?
The median age dogs of the breed tend to reach.
How to read it: Higher = longer-lived. Compare to longevity-for-size to see whether it's just a size effect.
Drawn from population lifespan records; individual dogs vary widely with care, genetics, and luck.
Afghan Hounds are a natural model for human disease
Because the same genes cause the same conditions across species, the inherited conditions documented in Afghan Hounds help researchers understand, and work toward treating, the human diseases they model. This is the dog advancing human medicine. The breed models the human disease; it does not have it, and this is not a prediction for your dog.
- narcolepsy 1, modeled by the breed's Narcolepsy via HCRTR2, the same underlying biology.
- trichomegaly, modeled by the breed's Hair, long , the same underlying biology.
- 46,XX disorder of sex development, modeled by the breed's XX difference of sexual development, generic , the same underlying biology.
Every condition recorded in the Afghan Hound
Beyond the testable carriers above, OMIA's literature catalogue records 4 genetic conditions in the Afghan Hound, 3 of which have a known human equivalent. This is the documented landscape across all Afghan Hounds ever studied, not a prediction for any one dog.
- Narcolepsy Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: narcolepsy 1
- Hair, long Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: trichomegaly
- XX difference of sexual development, generic MultifactorialHuman equivalent: 46,XX disorder of sex development
- Myelopathy, hereditary Probably autosomal recessive
Where every number on this page came from.
This page draws on three primary data sources. Carrier frequencies for the Mendelian section come from Donner et al. 2023 (CC-BY-4.0). We grade these data at evidence Limited because the cohort is a direct-to-consumer ascertainment, which biases toward owners who chose to test their dogs. The panel also uses tag-SNP proxies for some variants rather than direct causal-variant assays. Limited is a study-design grade, not a quality grade: the Donner cohort is the largest open canine-genotype dataset in existence and we are grateful for it. We rate the confounding MEDIUM.
Population-genetic dimensions (heterozygosity, intra-breed PCA distance, nearest neighbors, trait-locus frequencies) come from CanVAS (Brundage 2026), harmonized through the Sniff Atlas. The exact release date and verification commit are pinned at the bottom of the page so a researcher can trace a number back to a specific snapshot. The disease-gene-variant graph comes from OMIA (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals; Nicholas, Tammen, and the Sydney Informatics Hub at the Sydney School of Veterinary Science, The University of Sydney; retrieved April 2026, DOI 10.25910/2AMR-PV70).
What this page does not yet have. Inheritance modes and per-disease penetrance evidence from Donner 2023 are in the structured data for every variant the panel covers. Mondo, OMIM, Ensembl, and HGNC cross-references live on the gene and disease pages this page links to, rather than being repeated here. What is still absent from this breed page is anything not in the cited panel, and each such gap carries its cause where it appears.
How to cite this page. The computed dimensions on this page are derived from the open Sniff Atlas v1.0.1 (Gehring 2026, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20566358, CC-BY 4.0). Full citation formats including BibTeX, RIS, and CITATION.cff at sniff.world/cite.
Some things about living with a afghan hound never make it into a database. Add what you know as a Keeper, in your words →
Lived experience, kept beside the science.We have 21 afghan hounds. We do not have yours.
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- Donner J, Freyer J, Davison S, Anderson H, Blades M, Honkanen L, et al. (2023). Genetic prevalence and clinical relevance of canine Mendelian disease variants in over one million dogs. PLOS Genetics 19(2):e1010651. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1010651
- Brundage DM (2026). CanVAS: A Harmonized and Imputed Canine Variant Atlas. bioRxiv. doi:10.64898/2026.04.13.718238
- Nicholas, F.W., Tammen, I., & Sydney Informatics Hub. (2026). Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals (OMIA) [dataset]. The University of Sydney. https://omia.org. doi:10.25910/2AMR-PV70 (retrieved April 2026).