Intensive Care Unit Outcomes Among Patients With Cancer After Palliative Radiation Therapy

To inform goals of care discussions at the time of palliative radiation therapy (RT) consultation, we sought to characterize intensive care unit (ICU) outcomes for patients treated with palliative RT compared to all other patients with metastatic cancer admitted to the ICU. We conducted a retrospective cohort study of patients with metastatic cancer admitted to an ICU in a tertiary medical center from January 2010 to September 2015. We compared in-hospital mortality between patients who received palliative RT in the 12 months before admission and all other patients with metastatic cancer. We used multivariable logistic regression to evaluate the association between receipt of palliative RT and in-hospital mortality, adjusting for patient characteristics and acute illness severity. Among 1424 patients with metastatic cancer, 11.3% (n=161) received palliative RT before ICU admission. In-hospital mortality was 36.7% for palliative RT patients, compared with 16.6% for other patients with metastatic cancer (P