Symptom management and successful outpatient transplantation for patients with multiple myeloma.

This retrospective descriptive study compared symptoms and symptom management in patients who completed autologous peripheral blood stem cell transplantation without hospital admission with those of patients who required unplanned hospital admission during the transplantation period. The sample consisted of 87 patients with multiple myeloma treated as outpatients during a 16-month period. Medical records and electronic database records review for each patient provided data on patient characteristics, medical factors, and symptoms/symptom management.