These results are consistent with those in past publications, as studies showed that miR-153 acts as a tumor suppressor to regulate gastric cancer proliferation and metastases (Wang and Liu, 2015; Ouyang et al., 2018), and our previous study showed that CITED2 was overexpressed in gastric cancer cells and its knockdown suppressed cell division, and promoted apoptosis in cancer cells (Tang et al., 2017). This evidence concerns the gene CITED2 and cancer.