general practice management of obstructive sleep apnea in the midipyrnes introduction obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome osas is a significant public health problem in the french care system general practitioners have an important role to play in its management especially in the field of early diagnosismethods the first part of this work is a descriptive casecontrol study looking at health resource usage of osas patients treated with continuous positive airway pressure cpap in the midipyrnes area the second part is a descriptive study which involved by interviewing 100 general practitioners settled in the area in order to evaluate their knowledge and their practice regarding osas results were compared with a previous study 1 performed in 2002 with similar methodologyresults our results confirm that osas remains to a large extent undiagnosed mean osas patients was less than 6 per physician and underline the close connection between osas and cardiovascular diseases a low degree of knowledge concerning the symptoms main complications and treatment of osas was observed in this group of physicians there was however a relative improvement in the answers compared to the study performed in 2002 two or more complications were mentioned by 67 of practitioners 33 in 2002 and only 13 of them were unable to identify at least one possible complication of osas 50 in 2002conclusion this study confirms the impact on health of osas characterized by a higher consumption of various medications than in non osas patients knowledge of osas remains low in general practitioner population in france an important effort has to be made to improve learning of this disease by continuous medical training and during initial medical course