Introduction: Bone marrow transplantation is becoming increasingly common for the treatment of a variety of haematological malignancies and solid tumours as it allows the administration of higher, potentially more effective, chemotherapy doses. Despite several thousand abstracts and papers reporting on the results of transplant series there are very few randomised controlled trials and there is great uncertainty as to the true effectiveness of this treatment.

Objective: To systematically review the literature evaluating the efficacy of high-dose therapy plus progenitor cell transplantation (HDT+PCT) compared to conventional-dose chemotherapy in the treatment of acute and chronic leukaemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, breast, ovarian, lung and testicular cancer.

Methods: A systematic computerised literature search of Cancerlit, Embase and Medline was conducted, together with handsearching of a number of conference proceedings. Studies were eligible for inclusion in the review if patients were randomly, or pseudo-randomly, allocated HDT+PCT or conventional-dose chemotherapy for treatment of one of the above malignancies and the publication reported on the survival or disease-free survival of the patients. For disease sites where few RCT/CCTs were identified, non-randomised comparative studies were included and reviewed qualitatively.

Results/Discussion: For RCT/CCTs, individual and pooled odds ratios will be calculated for each disease site. The results of studies other than RCT/CCTs will be tabulated. Most emphasis will be placed on the results of RCTs. This project is in progress and final results will be available for presentation at the 5th International Cochrane Colloquium.