Following the publication of the above paper, the authors noted that the first author affiliation was presented incorrectly. Essentially, 'School of Medicine' had been omitted from the address. Therefore, the author and affiliation details for this paper should have been presented as follows (the changes are highlighted in bold): THANASEKARAN JAYAKUMAR1*, KAO‑CHANG LIN1,2*, WAN-JUNG LU1,3, CHIA‑YING LIN4, GERALDINE PITCHAIRAJ5, JIUN‑YI LI4,6 and JOEN‑RONG SHEU1,4. 1Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei; 2Department of Neurology, Chi Mei Medical Center, Tainan; 3Department of Medical Research, Taipei Medical University Hospital; 4Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.; 5Department of Animal Science, School of Life Sciences, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India; Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Mackay Memorial Hospital, and Mackay Medical College, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. The authors regret that the error with the first author affiliation was not noticed prior to the publication of their paper, and apologize for any inconvenience caused. [The original article was published in International Journal of Molecular Medicine 39: 174‑182, 2017; DOI: 10.3892/ijmm.2016.2822].