The recently developed diffraction technique of analytical investigation of the Rayleigh backscattering produced by an incident fundamental mode in a multimode optical fiber with an arbitrary refractive index profile is supplemented by taking into account the Rayleigh scattering-loss coefficient, which could be variable within the fiber cross section. The relative changes in various radial and azimuthal modes' excitation levels, due to some typical radial dependences of this coefficient, are computed for the quadratic-and step-index fibers. It is stated that the excitation efficiency could either rise or decay for different modes. The effect of the variable Rayleigh scattering-loss coefficient is shown to be more noticeable in the fibers with a quadratic refractive index profile, whereas it is negligible in actual multimode step-index fibers. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America