Huang JF, et al. - Nineteen hundred and forty two patients with chordoma (a kind of bone tumor, which is rare, relatively slow-growing, and a low-grade malignancy, but it is locally invasive and aggressive) were identified by the researchers in order to assess the conditional survival of chordoma patients to conceivably help doctors for planning of optimal cancer surveillance and guidance of better clinical decisions. An increase in the hazard ratio (HR) of patients with tumor size larger than 10 cm was observed in comparison to that of patients who underwent surgical resection and who received radiation therapy. In patients with regional or localized chordoma, the conditional 5-year disease-specific survival was comparatively constant over time, however, in patients with distant chordoma, gradual improvement was seen. Hence, for patients with chordoma, age at diagnosis, tumor size and disease stage could influence conditional survival. Further, a change could be seen in the HR of different factors over the survival time. Therefore, for accurate clinical treatment guidance, understanding the changing risk profile and conditional 5-year disease-specific survival of chordoma is critically important.