1. ¹Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
2. ²Division of Epidemiology, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway
3. ³Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
4. ⁴Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
5. ⁵INSERM U687, Villejuif, France
6. ⁶Research Unit, Department of Health, Basque Government, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
7. ⁷Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland
8. ⁸CHESS, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
9. ⁹Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Ljubljana, Slovenia
10. ¹⁰Department of Public Health, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
11. ¹¹Interface Demography, Centrum voor Sociologie-VUB, Brussels, Belgium
12. ¹²Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Correspondence: Dr G Menvielle, INSERM U687, Hôpital Paul Brousse, 16 avenue Paul Vaillant Couturier Bâtiment 15/16, 94807 VILLEJUIF CEDEX, France; E-mail: Gwenn.Menvielle@st-maurice.inserm.fr

Received 22 October 2007; Revised 23 January 2008; Accepted 28 January 2008; Published online 19 February 2008.

Abstract

We used longitudinal mortality data sets for the 1990s to compare socioeconomic inequalities in total cancer mortality between women and men aged 30–74 in 12 different European populations (Madrid, Basque region, Barcelona, Slovenia, Turin, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland) and to investigate which cancer sites explain the differences found. We measured socioeconomic status using educational level and computed relative indices of inequality (RII). We observed large variations within Europe for educational differences in total cancer mortality among men and women. Three patterns were observed: Denmark, Norway and Sweden (significant RII around 1.3–1.4 among both men and women); France, Switzerland, Belgium and Finland (significant RII around 1.7–1.8 among men and around 1.2 among women); Spanish populations, Slovenia and Turin (significant RII from 1.29 to 1.88 among men; no differences among women except in the Basque region, where RII is significantly lower than 1). Lung, upper aerodigestive tract and breast cancers explained most of the variations between gender and populations in the magnitude of inequalities in total cancer mortality. Given time trends in cancer mortality, the gap in the magnitude of socioeconomic inequalities in cancer mortality between gender and between European populations will probably decrease in the future.