We are grateful to Jiang for the insightful letter
Jiang’s letter effectively underscores the differences in implications between relative and absolute measures of inequality and clarifies how these distinctions shape priorities in public health practice. We agree that reliance solely on relative indices, such as the Relative Index of Inequality (RII), may risk overemphasising inequalities for cancers with a low mortality burden, where absolute differences are small despite statistically significant relative gradients. We emphasise that relative measures are also informative and provide evidence for inequalities in each specific cancer, reflecting risk factors ranging from individual and population behaviours and environmental factors to barriers to high-quality, early screening, diagnosis and treatment. As an…