OBJECTIVES: Chemotherapy offers cancer patients the potential benefits of improved mortality and morbidity but may cause detrimental outcomes due to adverse drug events (ADEs) that could require time-consuming, resource-intensive and costly clinical management. To appropriately assess chemotherapy agents in an economic evaluation, the impact of ADEs could be included in terms of their incidence, costs of their management and valuation of the perceived disbenefits via (dis)utility of ADEs. This review aimed to identify published studies reporting utility values for chemotherapy-related ADEs. METHODS: A structured electronic search combining terms for utility, utility valuation methods and generic terms for cancer treatment was conducted in MEDLINE and EMBASE in June 2011. Inclusion criteria were: 1) primary data, and 2) elicitation of utility of chemotherapy-related ADE. Two reviewers identified studies and extracted data independently. Any disagreements were resolved by a third reviewer. RESULTS: Eighteen studies met the inclusion criteria from the 853 abstracts initially identified, collectively reporting 218 utility values for chemotherapy-related ADEs. All eighteen studies used short descriptions (vignettes) to obtain the utility values. Of the 218 utility values, 178 were elicited using SG or TTO while 40 were elicited using VAS. There were 169 utility values of specific chemotherapy-related ADEs (with the top ten being anaemia (34 values), nausea and/or vomiting (32 utility values), neuropathy (21 values), neutropaenia (12 values), diarhoea (12 values), stomatitis (10 values), fatigue (8 values), allopecia (7 values), hand-foot syndrome (5 values) and skin reaction (5 values)) and 49 of non-specific chemotherapy-related adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: This study has summarised the current evidence base of utility values for chemotherapy-related ADEs. Only 178 of the 218 values were elicited using choice-based methods (SG & TTO) and therefore could potentially be used as parameter inputs in an economic evaluation incorporating ADEs of a chemotherapy agent.