Table 1. Comparison of target trial and emulated trial using ALSWH data.

	Target trial	Emulation with ALSWH
Eligibility criteria	Women aged 47–52 years with unimpaired physical functioning and prepared to accept an intervention to meet physical activity guidelines	Women in the ALSWH cohort aged 47–52 years with unimpaired physical functioning who either did or did not meet physical activity guidelines
Trial arms	Intervention: Women adhering to meet physical activity guidelines over a 15-year period	Intervention: Women meeting physical activity guidelines over a 15-year period (referred to hereafter as “exposed”)
	Control: Individuals caused to not meet physical activity guidelines	Control: Individuals not meeting physical activity guidelines
Assignment procedures	Random assignment to either intervention or control arm at recruitment	Adjustment for confounding using TMLE
Follow-up period	15 years of intervention period (6 triennial waves of follow-up), plus 3 years postexposure for measurement of outcome	15 years of exposure (6 triennial waves of follow-up), plus 3 years postexposure for measurement of outcome
Outcomes	Health-related quality of life assessed using the SF-36	Health-related quality of life assessed using the SF-36
Causal effect measure	The difference in means of outcomes in the intervention versus the control arms of the study	ATE estimated as the difference in conditional expected mean under treatment versus conditional mean under control

ALSWH, Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health; ATE, average treatment effect; SF-36, 36-item Medical Outcomes Study short-form survey; TMLE, targeted maximum likelihood estimation.