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The social gradient in health is one of the most reliable findings in public health research. The two competing hypotheses that try to explain this gradient are known as the social causation and the health selection hypothesis. There is currently no synthesis of the results of studies that test both hypotheses.

We provide a systematic review of the literature that has addressed both the health selection and social causation hypotheses between 1994 and 2013 using seven databases following PRISMA rules.

The search strategy resulted in 2952 studies, of which, we included 34 in the review. The synthesis of these studies suggests that there is no general preference for either of the hypotheses (12 studies for social causation, 10 for health selection). However, both a narrative synthesis as well as meta-regression results show that …