Searching for a Cure, CityU Grad
Jeffrey Trelka Finds a New Career

Popular wisdom suggests that if your children were sick, a medical expert would be the one to diagnose the problem and prescribe a cure. As City University of Seattle alumnus Jeffrey Trelka learned, that’s not always the case. When his identical twin daughters fell ill, getting the answers he needed involved taking matters into his own hands.

“My wife and I began to see oddities in our daughters,” says Trelka.  “They played with each other less, stopped playing with their pets altogether, and were losing previously mastered verbal language skills. Helena, for example, stopping saying ‘Hi, Kitty.’ Lillian stopped using the word ‘dad.’” 

A visit to their doctor proved frustrating.  “He said he couldn’t justify speech therapy because both girls were perfectly healthy,” recalls Trelka.

Dissatisfied with the doctor’s response, Trelka and his wife began to record every word spoken by their daughters.  At 18 months of age, weeks after they first suspected language loss, each girl was saying approximately 25-35 words and phrases per day.  A mere two months later, each girl had completely lost verbal language.  Both no longer made eye contact or looked up when their names were called.  In addition, they stopped napping during the day and sleeping at night.  Alarmed, the Trelkas consulted a pediatric neurologist. He diagnosed each girl with autism.

They were told very little is known about autism, but one thing was certain: The sooner their daughters received help from professionals, the more likely they would be able to lead productive lives. Trouble was, scheduling an appointment with a professional and receiving prompt treatment was nearly impossible.  Incidence rates for autism had skyrocketed from 1:10,000 in the 1960s to a staggering 1:164 in the 1990s, creating “treatment lines” in some cases almost two years long.

“These facts produced despair in me,” says Trelka. “The one thing we know is that it is important to secure early intervention, but it’s impossible to find appropriate services without waiting 6-22 months!”

The Trelkas felt helpless. They knew they had to do something for their daughters while they waited for care, but what? It seemed the most empowering action they could take was research. They began reading everything they could about autism, including referenced journal articles and books written by professionals, by parents, and by people with autism. They scoured the internet, searching for websites and list serves that might offer insight. Soon, Trelka’s knowledge of autism outgrew many of the professional’s who eventually provided services for his daughters.

“I’m comfortable making this claim because the professionals who were in daily contact with us admitted to rarely keeping up on the subject,” says Trelka. “I then wondered ‘How do these professionals know that their interventions are appropriate if they are unfamiliar with my daughters’ disorder and basic literature circumscribing it?’”

Trelka was more frustrated than ever. Treating autism had meant long waits for “early” intervention, exorbitant rates for services, and then, once services were finally secured (for many parents this meant taking out a second mortgage on their homes), the professionals in charge were not even schooled in the disorders they were treating. 

Trelka’s mission became clear. He decided to change careers and eventually start his own clinic dedicated to providing knowledgeable and affordable (if not pro bono) service to children and their parents. The first thing he did was switch his emphasis at CityU of Seattle from Computer Systems to Education. Then he went back to work learning everything he could about autism.

While researching, Trelka discovered that many parents of children with autism were placing their children on restrictive diets. Some parents reported impressive improvements in their children’s behavior. Some wrote books about their child’s complete recovery, crediting elimination diets. He also came across a great number of scientific papers revealing chronic gut problems in children with autism. The fact that gut issues were somehow connected to autism made it easy for him to believe that changing the diet might alleviate certain behaviors.

One diet in particular, a Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), caught his attention because some believed it helped heal damaged gastrointestinal systems in children. At the time, SCD was completely unstudied. Trelka decided that his core action research would attempt to confirm or disconfirm the effectiveness of a SCD for his daughters.

In the end, Trelka determined that a SCD diet was “a plausible intervention for undesirable behaviors.” With the help of his daughters’ pediatrician, Melvin L. Morse, Trelka then coauthored Observations from a Specific Carbohydrate Dietary Intervention in Two Children with Autism. It was later published in Medical Veritas: The Journal of Medical Truth. The article outlined his findings in great detail, providing other researchers with invaluable information and bringing the field of autism “a little closer to defining the intimacy between GI issues and children with autism.”

Today, Trelka is a little closer to achieving his dream of starting his consulting business. In 2006, he received his master’s degree from CityU. By the end of the year, he hopes to have completed the start-up stage of SpectrumStrategies. The organization will provide knowledgeable, professional, and appropriate service to children with developmental disabilities and their parents through educational, behavioral, and information consultation services. Importantly, SpectrumStrategies will be affordable, structured in a way that allows families in low-income brackets to gain access to critical, early intervention.