Should We Pucker Up and Welcome a Potential New Assessment of Muscle Function?

The interesting pilot study completed by Abe et al1 examined the relationships between lip compression strength (LCS) and handgrip strength (HGS) in 98 healthy adults. With maximal effort, participants compressed their lips on an oral performance instrument for measuring LCS and squeezed a handgrip dynamometer for the measurement of HGS. This pilot study revealed that LCS and HGS were moderately correlated in the overall sample [r = 0.62; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.47, 0.72]. Although the strength of the correlations between LCS and HGS decreased when the overall sample was stratified by sex (men: r = 0.48; CI 0.22, 0.67; women: r = 0.29; CI 0.01, 0.52), it is possible that the lower sampling from the sex stratification drove the strength of these findings downwards.