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Body sensor networks (BSNs) carry heterogeneous traffic types having diverse QoS requirements, such as delay, reliability and throughput. In this paper, we design a priority-based traffic load adaptive medium access control (MAC) protocol for BSNs, namely, PLA-MAC, which addresses the aforementioned requirements and maintains efficiency in power consumption. In PLA-MAC, we classify sensed data packets according to their QoS requirements and accordingly calculate their priorities. The transmission schedules of the packets are determined based on their priorities. Also, the superframe structure of the proposed protocol varies depending on the amount of traffic load and thereby ensures minimal power consumption. Our performance evaluation shows that the PLA-MAC achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art protocols.