LONDON Amputees suffering from "phantom limb pain" can be trained to overcome the condition, new research from Germany showed.

Professor Herta Flor of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim told Reuters the new treatment, which sends electric signals via electrodes attached to patients' arm stumps, could represent a breakthrough.

Phantom limb pain affects up to 80 percent of amputees and few effective treatments are available.

"This is the first time such methods have been applied to humans," Flor told Reuters by telephone.

"This is particularly exciting because we did not know if this method could be of therapeutic value."

The experiment, reported in the ***Lancet*** medical journal, tested 10 patients with amputations.

Five received standard medical treatment, including medication, nerve stimulation and physical therapy, and the remaining five underwent the electrode method.

Patients in the second group had 10 daily 90-minute sessions over two weeks of sensory training, in which they had to discriminate the frequency or location of high intensity, painless electric stimuli applied randomly through electrodes.

Both groups were given neurological, psychological and physical testing before and after the experiment.

Flor and her team found that patients given the electrode training were better able to discriminate the location and frequency of the stimulation by the end of the course.

Phantom limb pain decreased in all five patients over the course of the treatment and brain studies showed that changes to cortical mapping -- previously associated with limb amputation -- happened less often in patients given sensory training.

"Other treatments have either been proven only anecdotally or have not proven to be very effective at all," Flor said.

"This experiment is interesting because it is based on neuroscientific evidence."

She said phantom limb pain was recognized as a real pain by doctors despite being associated with missing limbs.

"It is a real pain in parts of the body not there any more. But it is not imagined. More recent thinking suggests that it is originating in the brain."

Flor said that further studies would be needed before the electrode treatment could be widely recommended.