Irish Wolfhound
Irish Wolfhounds have a cited life expectancy of 9.9 years (McMillan 2024 / VetCompass, n=509, 95% CI 9.2 to 11). No tested variant is carried by one percent or more of the 78 Irish Wolfhounds tested (Donner 2023). That describes the variants tested, not the breed's health.
Also known as Cu/Cu Faoil.
What genetic diseases do Irish Wolfhounds carry?
From a panel of 250 Mendelian-disease variants screened in 1,054,293 dogs (Donner et al. 2023), Irish Wolfhounds 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.
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.
Other names
The Irish Wolfhound is also recorded as Cu/Cu Faoil.
Identified as Irish Wolfhound (VBO:0200706) in the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (Mullen et al. 2025, CC-BY 4.0) · registry IDs FCI 160 · iDog 134 · VeNom 15134.
For researchers Population genetics, disease models and every recorded condition Open the research detail for the Irish Wolfhound
In the atlas, the Irish Wolfhound clusters consistently as Irish Wolfhound (100% of the 286 dogs here).
Ranks 8 of 107 on the bottleneck severity scale, among the most genetically contracted breeds in the atlas. High breed predictability score (3.77), individual dogs of this breed reliably cluster together genetically.
What the atlas genotypes say about Irish Wolfhound
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 Wolfhounds are a natural model for human cancer.
Some cancers appear in Irish Wolfhounds 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 Wolfhounds are a natural model for human disease
Because the same genes cause the same conditions across species, the inherited conditions documented in Irish Wolfhounds 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.
- dilated cardiomyopathy 1A, modeled by the breed's Cardiomyopathy, dilated , the same underlying biology.
- OMIM:262850, modeled by the breed's Delayed postoperative hemorrhage , the same underlying biology.
- glycogen storage disease due to GLUT2 deficiency, modeled by the breed's Fanconi syndrome , the same underlying biology.
- hyperekplexia 3, modeled by the breed's Hyperekplexia (Startle disease), SLC6A5-related , the same underlying biology.
Every condition recorded in the Irish Wolfhound
Beyond the testable carriers above, OMIA's literature catalogue records 8 genetic conditions in the Irish Wolfhound, 5 of which have a known human equivalent. This is the documented landscape across all Irish Wolfhounds ever studied, not a prediction for any one dog.
- Degenerative myelopathy Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis type 1
- Cardiomyopathy, dilated MultifactorialHuman equivalent: dilated cardiomyopathy 1A
- Delayed postoperative hemorrhage Autosomal dominant with incomplete penetranceHuman equivalent: OMIM:262850
- Human equivalent: glycogen storage disease due to GLUT2 deficiency
- Hyperekplexia (Startle disease), SLC6A5-related Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: hyperekplexia 3
- 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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- 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).