Physical activity and allcause mortality across levels of overall and abdominal adiposity

Background: The higher risk of death resulting from excess adipos-ity may be attenuated by physical activity (PA). However, the theo-retical number of deaths reduced by eliminating physical inactivity compared with overall and abdominal obesity remains unclear. Objective: We examined whether overall and abdominal adiposity modified the association between PA and all-cause mortality and esti-mated the population attributable fraction (PAF) and the years of life gained for these exposures. Design: This was a cohort study in 334,161 European men and women. The mean follow-up time was 12.4 y, corresponding to 4,154,915 person-years. Height, weight, and waist circumference (WC) were measured in the clinic. PA was assessed with a vali-dated self-report instrument. The combined associations between PA, BMI, and WC with mortality were examined with Cox pro