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Abstract Background Studying long-term trends in educational inequalities in health is important for monitoring and policy evaluation. Data issues regarding the allocation of people to educational groups hamper the study and international comparison of educational inequalities in mortality. For the UK, this has been acknowledged, but no satisfactory solution has been proposed. Objective To enable the examination of long-term mortality trends by educational level for England and Wales (E (2) the adjustment of identified data-quality related discontinuities in the trends over time in the share of personyears and deaths by educational level, and in the crude and the age-standardised death rate by and across educational levels; (3) complete mortality data by education for ONS-LS members aged 30+ in 1972–2017 which aligns with country-level mortality data for the total population; and (4) the estimation of inequality measures using established methods. For those aged 30+ , both absolute and relative educational inequalities in mortality first increased and subsequently decreased. Conclusion We obtained additional insights into long-term trends in educational inequalities in mortality in E&W, and illustrated the potential effects of different data issues. We recommend the use of (part of) the proposed approach in other contexts.
Janssen et al. (Sat,) studied this question.