Obesity as Compared With Physical Activity in Predicting Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women

The comparative importance of physical inactivity and obesity as predictors of coronary heart disease (CHD) risk remains unsettled.We followed 88 393 women, 34 to 59 years of age, in the Nurses' Health Study from 1980 to 2000. These participants did not have cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. We documented 2358 incident major CHD events (including nonfatal myocardial infarction and fatal CHD) during 20 years of follow-up, including...