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

Abstract: While patients receiving chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy frequently experience functional decline that would benefit from inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF), no currently published studies describe rehabilitation outcomes for this population. Thus, this study tested the hypothesis that CAR 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 IRF between January 2017 and December 2022. Nineteen CAR T-cell therapy patients were identified and matched by propensity scoring of disease and demographic variables to 19 patients without CAR 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 towards being significantly different between these two groups (p = 0.081), with CAR T-cell patients having a potentially higher gain (median = 0.333) compared to non-CAR T-cell patients (median = 0.133). Compared to hematologic malignancy patients matched for demographic and cancer variables, CAR 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 CAR T-cell population have the potential to achieve functional gains at a similar level to other hematologic cancer populations at IRF.