Italian Greyhound
Italian Greyhounds have a cited life expectancy of 14 years (McMillan 2024 / VetCompass, n=389, 95% CI 13.2 to 15.1). The most carried tested variant is Amelogenesis Imperfecta, in 23% of 263 Italian Greyhounds tested (Donner 2023), then Factor VII Deficiency (1.3%). Only 16 dogs stand behind the atlas figures here, so little is known yet.
Also known as French: Levrette d'Italie, German: Italienisches Windspiel, Italian: Piccolo Levriero Italiano, and Piccolo Levriero Italiano.
What genetic diseases do Italian Greyhounds carry?
From a panel of 250 Mendelian-disease variants screened in 1,054,293 dogs (Donner et al. 2023), Italian Greyhounds carry 3 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.
ENAMwhat this gene does
ENAM is a gene that helps form enamel, the hard outer layer of teeth. It plays a key role in making sure teeth develop strong and smooth.
For your dog: If your dog is from one of these breeds, it’s worth asking your vet about ENAM and dental health, especially if you notice unusual wear or discoloration on their teeth.
F7what this gene does
The F7 gene helps produce a protein important for blood clotting, which stops bleeding when dogs get injured.
For your dog: If your dog is from a breed known to carry F7 variants, it's worth mentioning to your vet before any surgery or if you notice unusual bleeding.
Other names
The Italian Greyhound is also recorded as French: Levrette d'Italie, German: Italienisches Windspiel, Italian: Piccolo Levriero Italiano, Piccolo Levriero Italiano, and Spanish: Galgo italiano.
Identified as Italian Greyhound (VBO:0200713) in the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (Mullen et al. 2025, CC-BY 4.0) · registry IDs iDog 135 · VeNom 14047.
For researchers Population genetics, disease models and every recorded condition Open the research detail for the Italian Greyhound
In the atlas, the Italian Greyhound clusters consistently as Italian Greyhound (100% of the 16 dogs here). Genetic diversity is high (mean heterozygosity 0.3419), reflecting either a mixed-breed cluster or breeds with broad genetic backgrounds. Dogs here sit in a relatively sparse region of the atlas, fewer close neighbors than typical.
Mean heterozygosity is 0.342, notably high, indicates broad genetic background. Only 16 dogs of this breed in the atlas, modestly sampled.
What the atlas genotypes say about Italian Greyhound
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.
Not enough dogs in the atlas yet (n=16) for a reliable diversity figure. It fills in as more are added.
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.
Not enough dogs in the atlas yet (n=16) to resolve cluster structure. It fills in as more are added.
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.
Italian Greyhounds are a natural model for human disease
Because the same genes cause the same conditions across species, the inherited conditions documented in Italian Greyhounds 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.
- Griscelli syndrome type 3, modeled by the breed's Coat colour, dilution, MLPH-related , the same underlying biology.
- OMIM:607855, modeled by the breed's Congenital muscular dystrophy, LAMA2-related , the same underlying biology.
- OMIM:269200, modeled by the breed's Multiple autoimmune diseases syndrome , the same underlying biology.
Every condition recorded in the Italian Greyhound
Beyond the testable carriers above, OMIA's literature catalogue records 5 genetic conditions in the Italian Greyhound, 3 of which have a known human equivalent. This is the documented landscape across all Italian Greyhounds ever studied, not a prediction for any one dog.
- Coat colour, dilution, MLPH-related Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: Griscelli syndrome type 3
- Congenital muscular dystrophy, LAMA2-related Autosomal recessiveHuman equivalent: OMIM:607855
- Human equivalent: OMIM:269200
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).