Palliative inpatient chemotherapy: Clinical benefit or harm?

e19527 Background: Palliative chemotherapy (CT) is given with the goals of palliating cancer symptoms and prolonging life. Patients with a poor performance status (PS) generally derive less benefit from CT and may experience greater toxicity. Advanced cancer patients admitted to hospital generally have a poor PS, and yet palliative CT is often administered to hospitalized patients. The evidence to support palliative CT in hospitalized patients is scarce. We hypothesize that palliative in-patient CT does not result in meaningful clinical benefit. Methods: With ethics approval, a retrospective chart review was undertaken to report outcomes from in-patient CT at the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre between April 2008- January 2010. From hospital pharmacy records, all advanced solid tumor patients receiving in-patient palliative CT were identified. Patients receiving radical, curative, neo- or adjuvant therapy, or those admitted for an inpatient regimen, were excluded. The primary endpoints were overall survival...