Following the publication of this paper, the authors have realized that the first two authors on the paper, Jing Wang and Ruiting Li, should have been credited with joint first author status. Furthermore, the second author affiliation was presented incorrectly in the paper, and the corrected address, as this should have been featured, is included below. Therefore, the authors' affiliations and the affiliation addresses should have appeared as follows: Jing Wang1*, Ruiting Li2*, Zhiyong Peng1, Bo Hu1, Xin Rao1 and Jianguo Li1. 1Department of Intensive Care Unit, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430071; 2Department of Critical Care Unit, Institute of Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430022, P.R. China. *Contributed equally. The authors confirm that there are no further errors in the study, and all the authors agree to this correction. The authors regret their oversight, and apologize for any inconvenience caused. [the original article was published in International Journal of Molecular Medicine 45: 61-80, 2020; DOI: 10.3892/ijmm.2019.4402].