Footnotes

• Competing interests None.

• Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

• ↵i Henceforth, we will use the term socioeconomic status (SES) to indicate someone's standing in the stratification system. Although SES is much broader a concept than education, we think it is appropriate to couch the following in terms of SES. Since inequalities in health behaviours and mortality have been shown according to a number of SES measures, suggesting that the particular SES measure used is not of key importance here.

• ↵ii The results of Mackenbach et al1 are in agreement with these previous studies, since, conversely to the trend of deepening absolute inequalities in mortality from external causes, liver cirrhosis and lung cancer, the trend in all-cause mortality is one of narrowing absolute inequalities.