Inpatient Rehabilitation Outcomes of Cancer Patients After Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy

While patients receiving chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy frequently experience functional decline that would benefit from inpatient rehabilitation facility, no currently published studies describe rehabilitation outcomes for this population. Thus, this study tested the hypothesis that chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy patients have similar functional outcomes to other cancer patients in rehabilitation, when matched for disease and demographic variables. This retrospective cohort study identified 84 patients with hematologic malignancies who presented to inpatient rehabilitation facility between January 2017 and December 2022. Nineteen chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy patients were identified and matched by propensity scoring of disease and demographic variables to 19 patients without chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. Between the matched populations, changes in section GG/Functional Independence Measure ratios for self-care and transfers were not statistically different ( P = 0.643 and 0.930, respectively). However, change in overall mobility ratio trended toward being significantly different between these two groups ( P = 0.081), with chimeric antigen receptor T-cell patients having a potentially higher gain (median = 0.333) compared to non-chimeric antigen receptor T-cell patients (median = 0.133). Compared to hematologic malignancy patients matched for demographic and cancer variables, chimeric antigen receptor T-cell patients had similar, and possibly superior, functional outcomes during inpatient rehabilitation. While further study of a larger sample size is needed, these data suggest the chimeric antigen receptor T-cell population have the potential to achieve functional gains at a similar level to other hematologic cancer populations at inpatient rehabilitation facility.