  We study whether a dominant contribution to neutrinoless double beta decay
coming from extra heavy degrees of freedom, introduced to generate the light
neutrino masses, can dominate over the light neutrino contribution. It has been
shown that this may occur at tree-level if the light neutrino contribution
partially cancels out. Here we focus on this case, specifically in the context
of type-I seesaw models paying special attention to the one-loop corrections to
light neutrino masses, their contribution to the process and correlation with
the heavy sector. We perform a general analysis without restricting the study
to any particular region of the parameter space, although interesting limits
associated with inverse and extended seesawlike models are discussed in more
detail. It turns out that the heavy neutrinos can dominate the process only in
those limits. For the inverse seesaw limit, we find a very constrained allowed
region of the parameter space, with heavy neutrino masses around 5 GeV. The
extended seesaw case allows for a larger region, but in general, a hierarchical
spectrum of heavy neutrinos with masses above and below $\sim100$ MeV is
required.
