Terminally ill patients with cancer who received chemotherapy were more likely to die in an intensive care unit than those who did not receive chemo, according to a new study.

Many advanced cancer patients receive chemotherapy that is only meant to make them more comfortable. They often don't realize it will not cure them, reports Fox News.

Holly G. Prigerson worked on the new study at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City said that in her experience, "palliative chemotherapy" often only makes patients sicker.

For the study, the researchers reanalyzed existing data from eight outpatient cancer treatment clinics. Among 386 terminally ill cancer patients, 216 were receiving palliative chemotherapy when the study began.

Those receiving chemo survived about as long - four months, on average - as those who were not. 

And 11 percent of chemo patients died in an intensive care unit (ICU), rather than at home, for instance, compared again to two percent of those not on chemotherapy, the researchers reported in the British medical journal BMJ.

"Often these cancer treatments in this situation have more risks than benefits, and this needs to be communicated better by doctors and their teams," said Dr. Andrew S. Epstein, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Palliative chemo can have benefits for some patients, shrinking tumors, reducing pain and improving quality of life, said Dr. Thomas W. LeBlanc, a cancer and palliative care doctor at Duke Cancer Institute in Durham, North Carolina.

"Like any tool, it must be applied very judiciously," he said. "It does not yield benefits in cases where patients are already significantly debilitated, or have markers of more advanced, refractory disease. It is probably even harmful in such settings."

But it can be very difficult for doctors to recognize exactly the point when chemotherapy goes from being useful to being harmful, said LeBlanc, who wasn't part of the research team.