Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking-attributable mortality in Europe; understanding trends 2000-2020 31 2 Comparing a wide range of European countries for a prolonged period of time is one of the strengths of this paper. Furthermore, the analyses presented in this paper rely on a unique set of data on mortality rates by country, age group, sex and educational group and include data on cause of death. Education has the benefit of being stable throughout the life course and has a strong link to behavioural factors such as smoking.50 However, as socioeconomic position is a complex construct, future research could investigate composite or multiple indicators of socioeconomic status simultaneously. Conclusion Overall, we can conclude that smoking-attributable mortality remains an important factor contributing to educational differences in life expectancy in Europe for both sexes. Among women, the peak in smoking-attributable mortality has not been reached yet in most countries, due to the time lag between smoking exposure and outcome. The good news is that low educated men in most countries are experiencing the greatest reductions in smoking-related mortality– the bad news is that educational gaps in mortality decline are emerging in mortality due to other causes of death. The need for tobacco control measures that decrease educational gaps remains high, especially for women. Acknowledgements Data were collected as part of; the CHAIN project, which has received financial support from the Nordic Research Council (grant number 288638), NTNU and Erasmus MC; the LIFEPATH project, which has received financial support from the European Commission (Horizon 2020 grant number 633666), the project “Longer life, longer in good health, working longer? Implications of educational differences for the pension system”, which has received financial support from Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement, and the DEMETRIQ project, which received support from the European Commission (grant numbers FP7-CP-FP and 278511). The mortality data for Switzerland were obtained from the Swiss National Cohort, which is based on mortality and census data provided by the Federal Statistical Office and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant nos. 3347CO-108806, 33CS30_134273 and 33CS30_148415). We acknowledge, Giuseppe Costa, Nicolas Zengirini, Henrik Brønnum-Hansen and Christoph Waldner, for providing and preparing the data.
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