What quirk of nature causes people with full heads of hair to rapidly, mysteriously, lose every strand? Palm Beach County resident Madonna Coffman desperately wants to know. Coffman is the president of Locks of Love, a nonprofit organization that’s donated $750,000 to the Miller School since 2006 in a bid to solve the riddle of alopecia areata.

Thought to be an autoimmune disease, alopecia areata causes hair loss that can last indefinitely or end after a year or two. About four million U.S. citizens suffer from alopecia areata, which strikes children 50 percent of the time and materializes without regard to gender, race, ethnic group, or age.

Buoyed by alopecia areata research performed by the Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Surgery at the Miller School, Coffman and Locks of Love made a $250,000 gift to the department last spring, after previously donating $500,000.

“The ball’s rolling, and we don’t want it to lose momentum due to a lack of funding,” says Coffman, who founded Locks of Love 11 years ago.

Alopecia areata can be confined to a patient’s head or spread over his or her entire body. Coffman is intimately familiar with how traumatic the disease can be, having come down with it in the 1980s. Just as mysteriously as her hair disappeared, it eventually reappeared.

Coffman’s second encounter took place when her daughter contracted alopecia areata at the age of 4. The disease vanished after 18 months, only to reappear six years later. Coffman’s daughter is now 15 and in recovery, following a second bout of alopecia areata that was four years in duration.

“When it happened to my daughter, as a mother it was ten times as traumatic as when it happened to me,” says Coffman. “Once it’s diagnosed, you’re not really given an answer as to why it’s present or how long it will be around, which is very frustrating. It’s not life-threatening, but it’s certainly life-altering.”

Children suffering from alopecia areata can be outfitted with a cranial prosthesis, a custom-fitted, vacuum-attached hairpiece made of human hair. These devices range in cost from $3,500 to $6,000, can be worn while bathing or swimming, and last two to three years. Coffman says Locks of Love, which is headquartered in West Palm Beach and has a presence in all 50 states, has donated more than 2,000 of these hair systems to children suffering from the disease.

Locks of Love joined forces with the Miller School, Coffman says, because in her estimation it’s one of just two medical facilities in the United States with top alopecia areata experts.

“The extremely generous benefaction of Locks of Love allows us to fund creative translational research that is both interdisciplinary and unique—and that brings us closer to understanding and curing alopecia areata,” says Lawrence A. Schachner, M.D., chair of the Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Surgery and Harvey Blank Professor of Dermatology.