Irish Setter
Irish Setters have a cited life expectancy of 12.9 years (McMillan 2024 / VetCompass, n=1,487, 95% CI 12.6 to 13.1). The most carried tested variant is Degenerative Myelopathy, in 2.4% of 83 Irish Setters tested (Donner 2023), then Rod-Cone Dysplasia 1 (1.2%). 23 dogs stand behind the atlas figures here, so treat this page as an early sketch.
Also known as Irish Red Setter and Red Setter.
What genetic diseases do Irish Setters carry?
From a panel of 250 Mendelian-disease variants screened in 1,054,293 dogs (Donner et al. 2023), Irish Setters carry 2 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.
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.
PDE6Bwhat this gene does
PDE6B is a gene that helps control how the eye processes light signals, crucial for normal vision.
For your dog: If your dog is from a breed known to carry PDE6B mutations, it's worth discussing vision health with your vet, especially if you notice any changes in sight.
What these results mean for a Irish Setter
2.4% of Irish Setters in the Donner 2023 cohort carried it (n=83).
- DM is a loss of function in the spinal cord that begins in adulthood and progresses to paralysis of the back legs. There is no treatment that stops it.
OMIA 000263-9615
“This is an adult onset degeneration of the spinal cord that progresses to paraplegia and tetraparesis. There is no successful treatment. A genetic test is available.” OMIA 000263-9615
- Two copies of the SOD1 variant mean at risk, not affected. Some dogs with two copies never show signs.
OMIA 000263-9615
“some homozygous mutant dogs had no signs of degenerative myelopathy, which suggests incomplete penetrance or other causative loci” OMIA 000263-9615
- One copy makes a dog a carrier. In the study that found the variant, every affected dog tested had two copies.
OMIA 000263-9615
“All affected dogs tested were homozygous mutant.” OMIA 000263-9615
What to do
A DNA result is not a diagnosis. Take the result, and any change in how the dog walks, to a veterinarian.
No test, or a mix
Without a test nobody can say how many copies a dog has. A breed's carrier frequency describes the breed, not this dog.
Other names
The Irish Setter is also recorded as Irish Red Setter and Red Setter.
Identified as Irish Setter (VBO:0200702) in the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (Mullen et al. 2025, CC-BY 4.0) · registry IDs iDog 131 · VeNom 22597.
For researchers Population genetics, disease models and every recorded condition Open the research detail for the Irish Setter
In the atlas, the Irish Setter clusters consistently as Irish Setter (100% of the 23 dogs here). Dogs here sit in a relatively sparse region of the atlas, fewer close neighbors than typical.
Ranks 25 of 107 on the bottleneck severity scale, well into the upper quartile of population contraction. Low breed predictability score (0.29), individual dogs of this breed vary widely in genetics, suggesting active substructure or sub-population diversity. Only 23 dogs of this breed in the atlas, modestly sampled.
What the atlas genotypes say about Irish Setter
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.
Irish Setters are a natural model for human cancer.
Some cancers appear in Irish Setters and in people driven by the same somatically-altered genes, cohort by cohort and cited on both sides. That makes this breed part of how we understand, and one day treat, the human disease. This is not a prediction about your dog, it is a window into the biology we share.
Irish Setters are a natural model for human disease
Because the same genes cause the same conditions across species, the inherited conditions documented in Irish Setters 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.
- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis type 1, modeled by the breed's Degenerative myelopathy via SOD1, the same underlying biology.
- hemophilia A, modeled by the breed's Haemophilia A via F8, the same underlying biology.
- Krabbe disease, modeled by the breed's Krabbe disease via GALC, the same underlying biology.
- leukocyte adhesion deficiency 1, modeled by the breed's Leukocyte adhesion deficiency, type I via ITGB2, the same underlying biology.
- narcolepsy 1, modeled by the breed's Narcolepsy via HCRTR2, the same underlying biology.
- retinitis pigmentosa 40, modeled by the breed's Retinal atrophy - Rod-cone dysplasia 1 via PDE6B, the same underlying biology.
Every condition recorded in the Irish Setter
Beyond the testable carriers above, OMIA's literature catalogue records 12 genetic conditions in the Irish Setter, 8 of which have a known human equivalent. This is the documented landscape across all Irish Setters ever studied, not a prediction for any one dog.
- Degenerative myelopathy Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis type 1
- Haemophilia A X-linked recessiveHuman equivalent: hemophilia A
- Krabbe disease Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: Krabbe disease
- Leukocyte adhesion deficiency, type I Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: leukocyte adhesion deficiency 1
- Narcolepsy Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: narcolepsy 1
- Retinal atrophy - Rod-cone dysplasia 1 Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: retinitis pigmentosa 40
- Retinal atrophy - Rod-cone dysplasia 4 Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: retinitis pigmentosa 54
- Spinal dysraphism Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: OMIM:603245
- Osteochondritis dissecans Multifactorial
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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Lived experience, kept beside the science.We have 23 irish setters. 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).