CHEERS to 30 Years of PharmacoEconomics

The first editorial reported that 700 articles containing the terms 'drugs ' and 'economics' had been published between 1966 and 1990 [1].In October 2021, there were almost 22,000 articles within this classification in MEDLINE alone.However, adding 'cost effectiveness' as a keyword expanded this to 1.5 million articles, and including 'quality of life' added another 330,000.The field has broadened since the early days and now covers analytical methods, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, medical devices, and aspects of health policy, as evidenced by the current scope of PharmacoEconomics.There were over 400,000 downloads of the journal's articles in 2020, and the journal has a current 5-year impact factor of 5.733.Like all sciences, the discipline of pharmacoeconomics was initially a collective human activity of the privileged, favouring affluent countries with well-established centres of learning, government, and industry.This suggests why articles in the journal have predominantly been from the UK, USA, and Western Europe, accounting for three-quarters of the papers published in 2020.