Following the publication of the above paper, the authors noted that the third author affiliation was presented incorrectly. The third author affiliation should have been written as 'Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, College of Medicine, and Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei 110, Taiwan'. Therefore, the author and affiliation details for this paper should have been presented as follows (the changes are highlighted in bold): YI CHANg1‑3*, WEN‑HsIEN HsU2,4*, WEN‑BIN YANg5, THANAsEKARAN JAYAKUMAR3, TZU‑YIN LEE3, JOEN‑RONg sHEU3, WAN‑JUNg LU3,6 and JIUN‑YI LI3,7. 1Department of Anesthesiology, Shin Kong Wu Ho‑Su Memorial Hospital, Taipei 111; 2School of Medicine, Fu‑Jen Catholic University, Xin Zhuang, New Taipei City 242; 3Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, College of Medicine, and Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei 110; 4Department of Surgery, Wan‑Fang Hospital, Taipei Medical University, Taipei 116; 5Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115; 6Department of Medical Research and Translational Laboratory, Research Department, Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei 110; 7Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Mackay Memorial Hospital, and Mackay Medical College, Taipei 104, Taiwan, R.O.C.. The authors regret that the error with the third 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 40: 1520‑1528, 2017; DOI: 10.3892/ijmm.2017.3133].