Following the publication of this article, we realize that an error was made with the second author's (Yanlei Sun's) address: This should have been written as "Department of General Surgery, Cancer Hospital of Linyi, Linyi, Shandong 276001", not as "Department of General Surgery, Central Hospital of Linyi, Linyi, Shandong 276400". Therefore, the author affiliations and addresses in this paper should have appeared as follows: SHICHANG CUI1, YANLEI SUN2, YANG LIU3, CHENGBIAO LIU1, JINBAO WANG1, GUANG HAO1 and QIDONG SUN1 1Department of General Surgery, Central Hospital of Linyi, Linyi, Shandong 276400; 2Department of General Surgery, Cancer Hospital of Linyi, Linyi, Shandong 276001; 3Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Central Hospital of Linyi, Linyi, Shandong 276400, P.R. China. The authors regret this error in the affiliation, and apologize for any inconvenience caused. [the original article was published in the Molecular Medicine Reports 16: 9494-9502, 2017; DOI: 10.3892/mmr.2017.7828].