Chinese Shar Pei
Chinese Shar Peis have a cited life expectancy of 10.6 years (McMillan 2024 / VetCompass, n=4,326, 95% CI 10.3 to 10.9). The most carried tested variant is Shar-Pei Autoinflammatory Disease, in 67% of 400 Chinese Shar Peis tested (Donner 2023), then Primary Lens Luxation (15%). 41 dogs stand behind the atlas figures here, so treat this page as an early sketch.
Also known as Cantonese Shar-Pei and Shar Pei.
What genetic diseases do Chinese Shar Peis carry?
From a panel of 250 Mendelian-disease variants screened in 1,054,293 dogs (Donner et al. 2023), Chinese Shar Peis carry 8 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.
MTBPwhat this gene does
MTBP is a gene involved in regulating inflammation in the body. It helps control how the immune system responds to triggers.
For your dog: If your dog is from a breed known to carry MTBP variants, it's worth discussing with your vet whether genetic testing or monitoring for inflammation-related issues makes sense.
ADAMTS17what this gene does
ADAMTS17 is a gene that influences body size and also plays a role in certain eye conditions. It affects the structure of tissues in the eye and elsewhere in the body.
For your dog: If your dog belongs to a breed known to carry ADAMTS17 variants, it’s worth discussing genetic testing and eye exams with your vet to stay ahead of potential issues.
Full ADAMTS17 gene page →SLC3A1what this gene does
SLC3A1 is a gene that helps transport certain amino acids in the kidneys. It plays a key role in preventing the buildup of cystine, which can form stones.
For your dog: If your dog is from a breed known to carry SLC3A1 variants, it’s worth discussing cystinuria risks with your vet, especially if urinary issues arise.
SLC7A9what this gene does
SLC7A9 is a gene that helps transport certain amino acids in the kidneys. It plays a role in how the body handles cystine, an amino acid that can form crystals.
For your dog: If your dog is a carrier, it’s worth discussing with your vet to monitor urinary health and catch any issues early.
FGF4what this gene does
FGF4 influences leg length by affecting bone growth, leading to shorter legs in certain breeds.
For your dog: If your dog is from a breed known to carry this gene, it's worth discussing spinal health with your vet, but being a carrier doesn’t guarantee problems.
SOD1what this gene does
SOD1 is a gene that helps protect cells from damage caused by harmful molecules called free radicals.
For your dog: If your dog is a carrier of SOD1 variants, it's worth discussing with your vet, but remember carrier status doesn't mean your dog will get the disease.
SLC2A9what this gene does
SLC2A9 is a gene that helps regulate uric acid levels in a dog's body. It plays a role in how the kidneys handle this substance.
For your dog: If your dog is one of the breeds known to carry this gene variant, it’s worth discussing with your vet to understand any potential urinary health concerns.
Other names
The Chinese Shar Pei is also recorded as Cantonese Shar-Pei and Shar Pei.
Identified as Chinese Shar Pei (VBO:0200351) in the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (Mullen et al. 2025, CC-BY 4.0) · registry IDs FCI 309 · iDog 73 · VeNom 13873.
For researchers Population genetics, disease models and every recorded condition Open the research detail for the Chinese Shar Pei
In the atlas, the Chinese Shar Pei clusters consistently as Chinese Shar Pei (100% of the 41 dogs here).
Median lifespan is 10.6 years, slightly shorter than expected for the breed size (22.5 kg).
What the atlas genotypes say about Chinese Shar Pei
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.
Chinese Shar Peis are a natural model for human disease
Because the same genes cause the same conditions across species, the inherited conditions documented in Chinese Shar Peis 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.
- OMIM:244400, modeled by the breed's Ciliary dyskinesia, primary, generic , the same underlying biology.
- Weill-Marchesani 4 syndrome, recessive, modeled by the breed's Glaucoma, primary open angle, ADAMTS17-related , the same underlying biology.
- OMIM:113800, modeled by the breed's Ichthyosis, KRT1-related , the same underlying biology.
- OMIM:601636, modeled by the breed's Periodic Fever Syndrome , the same underlying biology.
- inherited prekallikrein deficiency, modeled by the breed's Prekallikrein deficiency , the same underlying biology.
Every condition recorded in the Chinese Shar Pei
Beyond the testable carriers above, OMIA's literature catalogue records 9 genetic conditions in the Chinese Shar Pei, 6 of which have a known human equivalent. This is the documented landscape across all Chinese Shar Peis ever studied, not a prediction for any one dog.
- Human equivalent: OMIM:244400
- Glaucoma, primary open angle, ADAMTS17-related Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: Weill-Marchesani 4 syndrome, recessive
- Ichthyosis, KRT1-related Autosomal dominantHuman equivalent: OMIM:113800
- Lens luxation Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: Weill-Marchesani 4 syndrome, recessive
- Periodic Fever Syndrome MultifactorialHuman equivalent: OMIM:601636
- Prekallikrein deficiency Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: inherited prekallikrein deficiency
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.
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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).