title: Shrinking, widening, reversing, and stagnating trends in US socioeconomic inequities in cancer mortality for the total, black, and white populations: 1960-2006.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To test recent claims that cancer inequities are bound to increase as population health improves.
  
  
  METHODS
  We analyzed 1960-2006 age-standardized US county cancer mortality data, total and site-specific (lung, prostate, colorectal, breast, cervix, stomach), stratified by county income quintile for the US total, black, and white populations.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Between 1960 and 2006, US socioeconomic inequities in cancer mortality variously shrunk, widened, reversed, and stagnated, depending on time period and cancer site. For all cancers combined and most, but not all, sites, absolute, but not relative, socioeconomic gaps were greater for the black compared to white population. Compared to the yearly age-specific mortality rates among whites in the most affluent counties, the percent of excess cancer deaths among whites in the lower four county income quintiles first rose above 0 in 1990 and in 2006 equaled 5.4% (95% CI 4.8, 6.0); among blacks, it rose from 6.0% (95% CI 4.5, 7.4) in 1960 to 24.7% (95% CI 23.9, 25.5) in 1990 and remained at this level through 2006.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The hypothesis that cancer mortality inequities are bound to increase is refuted by long-term data on total and site-specific cancer mortality stratified by socioeconomic position and race/ethnicity.
authors: Department of Society, Human Development and Health (SHDH), Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Boston, MA 02115, USA. nkrieger@hsph.harvard.edu
authors: Nancy
authors: N
authors: Krieger
authors: Jarvis T
authors: JT
authors: Chen
authors: Anna
authors: A
authors: Kosheleva
authors: Pamela D
authors: PD
authors: Waterman
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D044383:Black People / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000191:economics / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000401:mortality*; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States; D044465:White People / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D001741:Black or African American