Yang CC, et al. - In this retrospective population-based study, researchers investigated how age influence the survival of patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) using different statistical methods. Performing uni- and multivariate analyses among a total of 28,639 patients with newly diagnosed HNSCC, they noted poorer 5-year disease-specific survival among patients who were older than 60 years regardless of tumor subsite and tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage. Performing a classification and regression tree (CART) analysis, they noted only a minor role of age in survival after comparing with other prognosticators. Using the Gini index, the relative importance of age was as follows: 3.21% for oral cancer, 8.32% for oropharyngeal cancer, 2.56% for hypopharyngeal cancer and 16.51% for laryngeal cancer. This suggests that for different patient groups, the influence of age varied according to the presence or absence of other prognosticators.